Claude Shannon Quotes

To know the future absolutely it to be trapped into that future absolutely. It collapses time. Present becomes future.

If time travel were possible, you still wouldn't be able to change the past - it's already happened!

Before you leave, the fortune teller reminds you that the future is never set in stone.

Knowing too much of your future is never a good thing.

Don't Time travel into the past. You can't change it. Today it starts all over again. Every tomorrow is determined by every day.

When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.

Changing anything in the past, if you believe it's possible, could alter the entire future of the world, including my own birth, so I'd change nothing. Not a thing. As for the future... I think I'd like to see how it all ends, which is probably why I write about the future apocalypse so frequently.

I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

Nothing is inevitable until it happens.

We animals live life in all its glorious uncertainty. Why do politicians think they can control events?

Man plans, but God decides.

Chance is the fool's name for Fate

She sees things — things that might happen, things that are coming. But it’s very subjective. The future isn’t set in stone. Things change.

There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.

It is bad enough to know the past; it would be intolerable to know the future.

I also don't believe that "everything happens for a reason," which is in a similar category of world-views.

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

Fate is unpenetrated causes.

The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.

There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

I did this movie, Predestination, and it's one of my favorite movies I've ever made, because sci-fi really lets you talk about ideas in a way that's not pretentious.

Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.

Men plan. Fate Laughs. Guis Alera, First Lord

It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.