prediction quotes

If I said I would knock out Sonny Liston in 1 minute and 49 seconds of the first round, that would hurt the gate.

I have a deep, deep belief that if I tell you I’m going to crack you with a clean shot to the chin inside one minute of the first round and you will be unconscious, well, then that’s what will happen.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

It’s going to be the year of the sharp elbow and the quick tongue.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.

The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.

A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

On one of my last days at school, the headmaster said I would either end up in prison or become a millionaire. That was quite a startling prediction, but in some respects, he was right on both counts!

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

When I say something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.

An economist’s guess is liable to be as good as anybody else’s.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

I’m not a fortune-teller.

I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.

Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.

It is not scientifically possible to accurately predict the outcome of an action. To suggest otherwise runs contrary to historical experience and the nature of war.

Although almost every theoretical physicist agrees with my prediction that a black hole should glow like a hot body, it would be very difficult to verify experimentally because the temperature of a macroscopic black hole is so low.

Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

Who is the wise man? He who sees what’s going to be born.

Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building arks does.

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I’m no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.