Cannot Predict Quotes & Sayings

You cannot predict the future. — Stephen Hawking

Governments don't protect people, people protect governments."
"Order is organic, it can't just be ordered up."
"The more complexity, the more unpredictability and therefore the more uncontrollability. You cannot control what you cannot predict. — Lawrence Samuels

Innocence lost is not easily regained. The designer simply cannot predict the problems people will have, the misinterpretations that will arise, and the errors that will get made. — Donald A. Norman

We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it. — Alan Kay

Defendants' essential contention is that bans on same-sex marriage promote the welfare of children, by encouraging good parenting in stable opposite-sex families ... Defendants have presented no evidence of any such effect. Indeed, they cannot even explain the manner in which, as they predict, children of opposite-sex couples will be harmed. Their other contentions are equally without merit. — Stephen Reinhardt

I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready. — E.F. Schumacher

The public still ultimately determines what happens to you politically, by virtue of the casting of their vote ... and you cannot ever predict what will move the public in one direction or another. — Willie Brown

If we have an atom that is in an excited state and so is going to emit a photon, we cannot say when it will emit the photon. It has a certain amplitude to emit the photon at any time, and we can predict only a probability for emission; we cannot predict the future exactly. — Richard P. Feynman

Everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone's list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last. — Stephen Hawking

Not moving because things are unfamiliar-and you haven't bothered to learn how to operate on them-I think is really a crime. The uncertain is the unknown and the unknown is the future, and you cannot predict the future. But the unfamiliar? You can learn how to operate in that. — Orit Gadiesh

We begin with the proposition that capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system but an information system. We continue with the recognition, explained by the most powerful science of the epoch, that information is best defined as surprised-what we cannot predict rather than what we can. The key to economic growth is not acquisition of things by the pursuit of monetary rewards but the expansion of wealth through learning and discovery. — George Gilder

Whatever is real in our universe is real in a moment of time, which is one of a succession of moments. The past was real but is no longer real. We can, however, interpret and analyze the past, because we find evidence of past processes in the present. The future does not yet exist and is therefore open. We can reasonably infer some predictions, but we cannot predict the future completely. Indeed, the future can produce phenomena that are genuinely novel, in the sense that no knowledge of the past could have anticipated them. Nothing transcends time, not even the laws of nature. Laws are not timeless. Like everything else, they are features of the present, and they can evolve over time. — Lee Smolin

We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish. — Arthur C. Clarke

[...] if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of 'like begets like'. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.
[review of The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life, Nature 442, 983-984 (31 August 2006)] — Jerry A. Coyne

We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish. — Ken Robinson

The true artist is indifferent to the materials and conditions imposed upon him. He accepts any conditions, so long as they can be used to express his will-to-form. Then in the wider mutations of history his efforts are magnified or diminished, taken up or dismissed, by forces which he cannot predict, and which have very little to do with the values of which he is the exponent. It is his faith that those values are nevertheless the eternal attributes of humanity. — Herbert Read

You cannot predict when grace takes place; you can only wait. Relax. — Mata Amritanandamayi

If some lives form a perfect circle, other take shape in ways we cannot predict or always understand. Loss has been part of my journey. But it has also shown me what is precious. So has love for which I can only be grateful. — Nicholas Sparks

Life does have its twists and turns, and that certainly is true. However, one can predict the future with some degree of accuracy based on one's own knowledge of past events. And rare events do occur , but it is their lack of repetition that makes them rare.
I cannot alter the past, but the future is very much in my hands
I find that memories, especially from one's childhood, very often do not live up to the realities
Does anyone truly understand females? the more I am in their company the less i know. Their behavior is the opposite of everything in the natural order and flies in the face of logic.
Oh, I can see you are enjoying yourself. You have my heart, and now you will toy with it
She did believe that two souls could come together, so that the one would know if something had happened to the other despite distance or war.
The only way to get through life's rough spots is to laugh whenever possible — Mary Lydon Simonsen

Inasmuch as you cannot predict if and when you will be disappointed, once it happens you have only two choices: You can either let it consume you, until you become bitter and resentful. Or, you can accept what has happened, learn from it and move on. It really is that simple. What we tend to do is over analyze. — Carlos Wallace

I am no ecological Pollyana. I have borne, and will continue to bear, feelings of wholehearted melancholy over the ecological state of the earth. How could I not? How could anyone not? But I am unwilling to become a hand-wringing nihilist, as some environmental 'realists' seem to believe is the more mature posture. Instead, I choose to dwell, as Emily Dickinson famously suggested, in possibility, where we cannot predict what will happen but we make space for it, whatever it is, and realize that our participation has value. This is grown-up optimism, where our bondedness with the rest of creation, a sense of profound interaction, and a belief in our shared ingenuity give meaning to our lives and actions on behalf of the more-than-human world. — Lyanda Lynn Haupt

In the future, instead of striving to be right at a high cost, it will be more appropriate to be flexible and plural at a lower cost. If you cannot accurately predict the future then you must flexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures. — Edward De Bono

We [human beings] are two-legged omnivorous animals, and this means that we have many ecological niches, regarding the possible places where we can live. Therefore, we have to adapt to these different environments and we cannot predict, in a generic way, in which type of world we are going to live (cold as the North Pole or hot as Congo). — Rodolfo Llinas

A child's bond to her mother cannot be understated, and my bond with Helen was a ragged, baffling, disheartening, chaotic mess. I felt crazy, often, around my own mother. I grew up questioning what was normal, asking what reality was and wasn't, and not trusting the outcome of different situations. She scared me and I couldn't predict her behavior, so I was often off-kilter and worried. — Cathy Lamb

people cannot always predict the outcomes of maintaining or terminating a particular relationship. How can you make a decision without knowing the likely costs or benefits? — Frank Zhu

Since words elude me when I need them most, I learned long ago that I cannot count on QUALITY time with God when I want to pray. I need QUANTITY and regularity. Quality is not something I can predict. My husband, Andy, and I might schedule an elaborate evening out with candles and a gourmet meal, but there is no guarantee that we'll have a wonderful time together
chopping onions peppers die by side in the kitchen, reading together on the couch, sitting on the front step watching our sons ride bikes, and making plans for our life together. — Sybil MacBeth

An election marks the end of the affair; it puts paid to the seduction of the many by the few. Pretty words, fulsome promises. We wind up married, but to whom, to what? We cannot always predict with certainty the future leader from the winning candidate. Some men grow in the job; others are diminished by its demands and its grandeur. — Anna Quindlen

We are who we choose to be, so we cannot change our past nor predict our future, but we can live each day to the fullest by sharing love and laughter with friends and associates. — Irma Schettini Caiazzo

Every second of every day, a man is the sum effect of every second that has touched him before; he routinely encounters influences that will produce changes and actions that he cannot begin to predict or understand. And yet to acknowledge the complexity of these causes and motives was not to disallow agency. In that, all men are equal, even the cloistered monk--equally innocent, equally guilty. A man is not wholly responsible for what he becomes, but he is absolutely accountable for who he is. — John Pipkin

What is it, really, that we could lose if we handed ourselves over to the discernment of faith? Would we really lose anything except the illusion of control? This question suggests that there may be an idolatrous project underlying resistance to spiritual discernment: the desire for a decision-making process that we can predict and control.
But the obedience of faith offers no certainties, not even that of being certain of our our fidelity. We cannot know if the decision we make here and now are correct. We only know that they are the best we are able to make, and that in the future we might both regret them and need to change them. The reason has nothing to do with our sinfulness and everything to do with the fact that faith has to do with the Living God, who always moves ahead of us in surprising and sometimes shocking ways. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Heb. 10:31). — Luke Timothy Johnson

We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child - pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existers suffer harm. — David Benatar

What China would do, I cannot predict. China has all but given up the claim to the use of force, except in the circumstance of Taiwan declaring its independence. That is a huge step forward over what the situation was many years ago. — Henry A. Kissinger

Basins of attraction, of self organization, show up as well in our complex social environment, in human organizations. Here again, while we cannot predict the result of any given input, we can say that it will likely fall within one of several areas. — Kevin Kelly

Those who try to "break on through to the other side" not only cannot predict what they may find there, but are themselves too often broken in the process. — Charles Shaar Murray

Fate is a misplaced retreat. Many people rationalize an unexplained event as fate and shrug their shoulders when it occurs. But that is not what fate is. The world operates as a series of circles that are invisible, for they extend to the upper air. Fate is where these circles cut to earth. Since we cannot see them, do not know their content, and have no sense of their width, it is impossible to predict when these cuts will slice into our reality. When this happens, we call it fate. Fate is not a chance event but one that is inevitable, we are simply blind to its nature and time. — James Levine

Will it be possible to solve these problems? It is certain that nobody has thus far observed the transformation of dead into living matter, and for this reason we cannot form a definite plan for the solution of this problem of transformation. But we see that plants and animals during their growth continually transform dead into living matter, and that the chemical processes in living matter do not differ in principle from those in dead matter. There is, therefore, no reason to predict that abiogenesis is impossible, and I believe that it can only help science if the younger investigators realize that experimental abiogenesis is the goal of biology. — Jacques Loeb

We have the technology to build a global paradise on earth, and at the same time, we have the power to end life as we know it. I am a futurist. I cannot predict the actual future - only what it can be if we manage the earth and its resources intelligently. — Jacque Fresco

I always choose an area that is of personal interest, but I don't plan my travels in detail. There are so many variables one cannot predict: the changing light, weather, personal mood, and often just plain luck. Of course, you must have a starting point, so I establish some fixed points then improvise as I go. In many cases the locations seem to choose me. — Josef Hoflehner

You cannot fully understand a person's need until you have endured the same need. As hard as you may try to predict and comprehend their situation and suffering, I guarantee you'll fall short until you've been there. — Richelle E. Goodrich

In Arizona we have passed laws to free our people so that they can defend themselves and their loved ones. You cannot predict where evil will raise its head, but you can be prepared for it. — Russell Pearce

We teach people in order to open up their minds and release their captive powers. But we cannot predict the result. Freedom - we free their minds from superstition. We give the people the keys of the future to act therein as they wish. — Tayeb Salih

In any honest analysis, change is the basis of fear, the idea of something new, of some paradigm that is unfamiliar, that is beyond our experiences so competent that we cannot even truly predict where is will lead us. — R.A. Salvatore

We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference ... the relief will be very political, in who gives how much (Bush offering 15 million, then 35 million under pressure, the cost of his inauguration and then 350 million under strong international pressure) ... but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to prevent. We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality ... we cannot wish for the seas to dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates ceast to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control ... But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and suffering, which leaves us with sorrow as not a problem to be solved but a fact. And it leaves us with compassion as the work we will never finish — Rebecca Solnit

Over the course of my years, I have met thousands of people. I have dined with the prosperous as well as the poverty-stricken. I have conversed with the mighty and with the meek. I have walked with the famous and the feeble. I have run with outstanding athletes and those who are not athletically inclined. One thing I can tell you with certainty is this: You cannot predict happiness by the amount of money, fame, or power a person has. External conditions do not necessarily make a person happy ... The fact is that the external things so valued by the world are often the cause of a great deal of misery in the world. Those who live in thanksgiving daily, however, are usually among the world's happiest people. And they make others happy as well. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

When an influencing idea comes to life, people cannot exactly predict all its inevitable consequences. — Eraldo Banovac

one cannot "predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely! — Bill Bryson

By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make - and in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to. — Sam Harris

want to either. We take what is offered us on this earth and live life to the fullest. No one can predict their own future, though many have tried. What will be is what will be in the end. You cannot change the course of time." The king patted Nicholas — Robyn Neeley

One cannot predict the next mythology any more than one can predict tonight's dream; for a mythology is not an ideology. It is not something projected from the brain, but something experienced from the heart, from recognition of identities behind or within the appearances of nature, perceiving with love a 'thou' where there would otherwise have been only an 'it.' — Joseph Campbell

The internet has to be protected from intrusive monitoring or else the medium upon which we all rely for the basis of our economy and our normal life, we'll lose that, and it's going to have broad effects as a consequence that we cannot predict. — Edward Snowden

Look to your right ... It is the path back home. If you choose, you can take it. It is safe, easy, and comfortable. You do not have to work out or fight or do anything else you do not want to ...
Or you can keep moving forward. I will not lie to you. I cannot predict what may become of you. It will require a lot of training, hard work, study, and danger. But in the very end, you will know strength. I swear it. You might just become someone who will make a difference in the world. — Wesley Chu

The only thing I cannot predict is the future — Amit Trivedi

If two points are destined to touch, the universe will always find a way to make the connection- even when all hope seems to be lost. Certain ties cannot be broken. They define who we are and who we become. Across space, across time, among paths we cannot predict- nature will always find a way. — Savi Sharma

Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skilled manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict. — Tom Clancy

You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is like a farmer create the conditions under which it will begin to flourish. — Ken Robinson

Conspiracy theory, like causality, works fantastically well as an explanatory model but only if you use it backwards. The fact that we cannot predict much about tomorrow strongly indicates that most of the explanations we develop about how something happened yesterday have (like history in general) a high bullshit content. — Peter J. Carroll

Visions and voices and fear and despair cannot be captured by CT scan or measured in the amplitude of EKG waves. Try as we might, we simply cannot predict which of our patients will kill themselves, which will murder their children, and which will leave the hospital healed, never to return. — Christine Montross

Allow me to inquire how man can control his own affairs when he is not only incapable of compiling a plan for some laughably short term such as, say, a thousand years, but cannot even predict what will happen to him tomorrow? — Mikhail Bulgakov

The incomplete knowledge of a system must be an essential part of every formulation in quantum theory. Quantum theoretical laws must be of a statistical kind. To give an example: we know that the radium atom emits alpha-radiation. Quantum theory can give us an indication of the probability that the alpha-particle will leave the nucleus in unit time, but it cannot predict at what precise point in time the emission will occur, for this is uncertain in principle. — Werner Heisenberg

History is sensitive dependent on initial conditions. You cannot predict the future. — Maureen F. McHugh

Precisely because we cannot predict the moment, we must be ready at all moments. — C.S. Lewis

We certainly will prepare consciously and professionally, but still you cannot predict the future. — Laurent Jalabert

You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well. — Emma Donoghue

However, once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end and a completely new kind of process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend. Many scholars try to predict how the world will look in the year 2100 or 2200. This is a waste of time. Any worthwhile prediction must take into account the ability to re-engineer human minds, and this is impossible. There are many wise answers to the question, 'What would people with minds like ours do with biotechnology?' Yet there are no good answers to the question, 'What would beings with a different kind of mind do with biotechnology?' All we can say is that people similar to us are likely to use biotechnology to re-engineer their own minds, and our present-day minds cannot grasp what might happen next. — Yuval Noah Harari

Treasure your moments...you cannot predict how many you get!" - Lara Velez — Lara Velez

As an investor I cannot tell that. We cannot predict the success or failure. — Ron Conway

On the third day after Jesus' own death, He came out of the grave to give the world a sign it cannot deny. For a man to predict His own death and resurrection was something only God could do. — David Jeremiah

Your fear comes not from what you're afraid will happen. Your fear comes from thinking what may happen. You cannot predict your future. You can however, create your future. What happened yesterday is over. What happens today is up to you ... . — James A. Murphy

It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers. — Terence McKenna

The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace's dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic. We certainly cannot predict future events exactly if we cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!
We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determine events completely for some supernatural being who, unlike us, could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us ordinary mortals. It seems better to employ the principle of economy known as Occam's razor and cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed. — Stephen Hawking

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilisation. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others. — Bertrand Russell

From my experience of shooting 'Tudors' on the island of Ireland, you cannot predict the weather. — Natalie Dormer

I worry about fast forgivers. They tend to forgive quickly in order to avoid their pain. Or they forgive fast in order to get an advantage over the people they forgive. And their instant forgiving only makes things worse ... People who have been wronged badly and wounded deeply should give themselves time and space before they forgive ... There is a right moment to forgive. We cannot predict it in advance; we can only get ourselves ready for it when it arrives ... Don't do it quickly, but don't wait too long. — Lewis B. Smedes

Introspection makes our conscious motives and strategies transparent to us, while we have no sure means of deciphering them in others. Yet we never genuinely know our true selves. We remain largely ignorant of the actual unconscious determinants of our behavior, and therefore we cannot accurately predict what our behavior will be in circumstances beyond the safety zone of our past experience. The Greek motto "Know thyself," when applied to the minute details of our behavior, remains an inaccessible ideal. Our "self" is just a database that gets filled in through our social experiences, in the same format with which we attempt to understand other minds, and therefore it is just as likely to include glaring gaps, misunderstandings, and delusions. — Stanislas Dehaene

Unlike science, creationism cannot predict anything, and it cannot provide satisfactory answers about the past. — Bill Nye

We risk great peril if we kill off this spirit of adventure, for we cannot predict how and in what seemingly unrelated fields it will manifest itself. A nation that loses its forward thrust is in danger, and one of the most effective ways to retain that thrust is to keep exploring possibilities. The sense of exploration is intimately bound up with human resolve, and for a nation to believe that it is still committed to a forward motion is to ensure its continuance. — James A. Michener

Human science too is concerned with establishing similarities, regularities, and conformities to law which would make it possible to predict individual phenomena and processes. In the field of natural phenomena this goal cannot always be reached everywhere to the same extent, but the reason for this variation is only that sufficient data on which the similarities are to be established cannot always be obtained. Thus the method of meteorology is just the same as that of physics, but its data is incomplete and therefore its predictions are more uncertain. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves. — Miguel Nicolelis

The primary difference between the classical layer and the quantum layer is that the classical layer deals with facts and the quantum layer deals with probabilities. In situations where classical laws are valid, we can predict the future by observing the past. In situations where quantum laws are valid, we can observe the past but we cannot predict the future. In the quantum layer, events are unpredictable. — Freeman Dyson

If you cannot predict the betrayal from the ones that you love and trust the most, then you are living in a fool's paradise. — Lionel Suggs

You cannot predict the future but you can love and then love some more. — Julieanne O'Connor

Seen from Earth, a comet is a prodigy, coming out of the void for no reason, returning to the void for no reason. They call it unpredictable because they cannot predict it. From the comet's own point of view, nothing could be simpler. It starts in the outer darkness, aims directly at the sun, and never stops till it gets there. Everything else spins in its same orbit forever. The comet heads for the source. They call it crooked because it is too straight. They call it unpredictable because it is too fixed. They call it chaotic because it is too linear. — Scott Alexander

While we cannot accurately predict the course of climate change in the coming decades, the risks we run if we don't change our course are enormous. Prudent risk management does not equate uncertainty with inaction. — Steven Chu