Gregory Bateson Quotes

No one can predict the future.

We have the same problem as everyone else: It's very hard to predict the future.

I can't predict the future.

We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future.

I don't think anybody has that crystal ball but the president.

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

Foreseeing the future is always difficult.

I can't predict the future, nor will I. I'm not a fortune teller.

I don't think there is such a thing as as a real prophet. You can never predict the future. We know why now, of course; chaos theory, which I got very interested in, shows you can never predict the future.

What I have figured out is that I can predict the future. I just can't predict when.

The deduction of effect from cause is often blocked by some insuperable extrinsic obstacle: the true causes may be quite unknown. Nowhere in life is this so common as in war, where the facts are seldom fully known and the underlying motives even less so.

The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis.

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies

You never know what's going to happen to you when you head out into the big world. And when you get older, you don't know how you're going to be thought of or seen.

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.

I refuse to say anything beyond five years because I don't think we can see much beyond five years.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be faster changing and more unpredictable than the present.

The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.

You can't see the future, there's no such thing. It's all bets. You'll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn't mean either of them's wrong.

The first thing you should know about people is that you don’t know the first thing about them.

Prediction is difficult - particularly when it involves the future.

Little do you know what a gloriously uncertain thing law is.