Quotes about foreseeing the future

Anyone with an overactive imagination, in particular a perversely negative one, need never be surprised by anything. The imagination absolutely can catch out imminent disasters as they're warming up, especially if you keep your nostrils open. People who can accurately read the future: are they gifted at seeing or gifted at guessing?

But what argument could I offer? It was nothing but an irrational feeling—the kind of “premonition” we get from time to time but remember only on the rare occasions when it is fulfilled by the event. I had no evidence.

“You can’t prove what’s going to happen in the future,” explains Naomi Oreskes, who has written extensively on the uses of modeling. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t have a rational basis for action.”

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: “At the time, no one knew what was coming.”

He had done everything asked of him, and now he just wanted to concentrate on his own work. Something told him, however, that it was not going to be that simple, and he knew that bad premonitions have a far higher accuracy rate than good ones.

“It’s not going to come to that,” I said.

“Nobody ever believes it will,” so the driver. “That’s why it does.”

You can only predict things after they’ve happened.

Anyone who studies present and ancient affairs will easily see how in all cities and all peoples there still exist, and have always existed, the same desires and passions. Thus, it is an easy matter for him who carefully examines past events to foresee future events in a republic and to apply the remedies employed by the ancients, or, if old remedies cannot be found, to devise new ones based upon the similarity of the events. But since these matters are neglected or not understood by those who read, or, if understood, remain unknown to those who govern, the result is that the same problems always exist in every era.