Predicting the Future Quotes

Study the past if you would define the future. --CONFUCIUS

Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying.

June smiled. "So what will it be? Safety, or a future of pain and possibility?"

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, predicts the future, but in addition to predicting it (which would satisfy his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: the world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the slave and tool of his environment and converts himself into the architect of his own destiny.

History teaches everything, even the future.

You can't see the future through a rearview mirror

One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying.

A president cannot make decision on what someone might know in the future.

I was not predicting the future, I was trying to prevent it.

Foresight is not about predicting the future, it's about minimizing surprise.

I do not like to talk about the future. I don't like to be one of those people. It's so easy to have a very vague idea and say, oh, computers will be 3D-ish and then 10 years later I'll say I predicted it 10 years ahead. I don't think that's honest and I don't think that's valid and worth anything.

To regard one's immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth.

By the needle you shall draw the thread, and by that which is past, see how that which is to come will be drawne on.

If you try to measure the future, you will never risk the present. Playing it safe. A ghastly game.

It's a bit counter-intuitive to think about the future in terms of the past. But...I've learned an important trick: to develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight. Technologies, cultures, and climates may change, but our basic human needs and desires - to survive, to care for our families, and to lead happy, purposeful lives - remain the same.' p 5

Suddenly question number four popped into my mind. Have you thought about how this relationship will end?

I have read for countless people on innumerable subjects and the most difficult thing to understand within the cards is always the timing. I knew that, and still it surprised me. How long I was willing to wait for something that was only a possibility. I always thought it was just a matter of time but I was wrong.

How hard it is to project oneself into the future. We are always prone to think of the conditions which are with us today as being permanent conditions.

How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past?

My mom just told me it's impossible to know what's going to happen in life. Except with breakfast, cause she eats the same thing every day.

The best way to know any future is to cause one.

From now on, I don't care if my tea leaves spell 'Die, Ron, Die,' I'm chucking them in the bin where they belong.