Quotes & Sayings About Prescience

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one. — Christopher Hitchens

It is a consolation or a misfortune that the wrong kind of people are too often correct in their prognostications of the future; the far-seeing are also the foolish. — Robbie Ross

I am sure that you have had, as we all have, that mysterious experience of prescience
a moment when, beyond reason and cause, at a word, or a flicker of an eyelid, or at anything at all, one has a sudden foreboding
of what,one does not know,. I am not a religious man; but sometimes I am nearly tempted to believe that the gods do speak to us, and that only in unguarded moments do we listen. — John Edward Williams

Many intelligent and well-informed people were keenly interested in the future of the economy and did not believe a catastrophe was imminent; I infer from this fact that the crisis was not knowable. What is perverse about the use of know in this context is not that some individuals get credit for prescience that they do not deserve. It is that the language implies that the world is more knowable than it is. It helps perpetuate a pernicious illusion. — Daniel Kahneman

Armon stared into the wild darkness of his opponent and saw a reflection of his own fall. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One Beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings. — Flann O'Brien

We have seen segments of our Government, in their attitudes and action, adopt tactics unworthy of a democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of totalitarian regimes. We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what witnesses characterized as "vacuum cleaners", sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens. The tendency of intelligence activities to expand beyond their initial scope is a theme which runs through every aspect of our investigative findings. Intelligence collection programs naturally generate ever-increasing demands for new data. And once intelligence has been collected, there are strong pressures to use it against the target. — Church Committee

If the sale of flesh could be made as easily as the sale of spiritual exemption, the prescience of a dedicated businessman might be well preserved. — Michelle Franklin

Maybe my homesickness was a form of prescience because when I look back, it's the circumstances of this very car ride that I recognize as irretrievable: the experience of driving nowhere in particular with my sister, both of us seventeen years old, the open windows causing our hair to blow wildly; that feeling of being unencumbered; that confidence that our futures would inform the way we wanted them to and our real lives were just beginning. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Prophecy and prescience - How can they be put to the test in the face of the unanswered question? Consider: How much is actual prediction of the "wave form" (as Muad'Dib referred to his vision-image) and how much is the prophet shaping the future to fit the prophecy? What of the harmonics inherent in the act of prophecy? Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, a fault or cleavage that he may shatter with words or decisions as a diamond-cutter shatters his gem with a blow of a knife? — Frank Herbert

There's no way for me to warn you about the terrible things that I know are going to happen. — Dexter Palmer

He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed. — Frank Herbert

Superior insight into history used to be exhilarating for radicals: if we can see more clearly than the Enemy what is really going on, then we can use this knowledge to advance our values. But now the clearer one's insight, the more numbed one becomes. Thus during the war, some of us wrote articles in this magazine predicting that the conflict would not solve anything,... that the methods used by the Allies were infecting the moral atmosphere, that Russia and America would clash violently as soon as Germany was disposed of, etc., etc.... It turns out we were more right than [the rest]. This should make us feel prescient, confident. Instead, it is discouraging. — Dwight Macdonald

Any hope of prescience requires a constant questioning of what is, and a deep-seated belief in the possibility of what can be. — R.A. Salvatore

There are boxers possessed of such remarkable intuition, such uncanny prescience, one would think they were somehow recalling their fights, not fighting them as we watch. — Joyce Carol Oates

I und'standed why Meronym'd not said the hole true 'bout Prescience Isle an' her tribe too. People b'lief the world is built so an' tellin 'em it ain't so caves the roofs on their heads'n'maybe yours. Old — David Mitchell

All our knowledge hast its origins in our perceptions ... In nature there is no effect without a cause ... Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments ... Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Lady Tina DeSilva. The president of the Ryan Foxheart Fan Club Castle Lockes Chapter. And my most mortal of enemies. "Oh look, everyone. Mervin has arrived and he brought the muffins. If past experiences have any prescience as to what we can expect, then they're sure to be as dry as his conversational skills." She was also sixteen years old. And evil. — T.J. Klune

The New York Times, with what was threatening to become a customary lack of prescience, forecast that it would never be a serious competitor for radio because "people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it."34 — Bill Bryson

I hadn't learned to decipher the mysterious ways of the undermind, How occasionally it erupts into an avalanche of clarity, a sheet of snow shearing off the roof and thundering to the ground, leaving the shingles exposed, knowledge issuing a messenger to announce its arrival. — Kate Bolick

God will not suffer man to have a knowledge of things to come for if he had prescience of his prosperity, he would be careless and if understanding of his adversity, he would be despairing and senseless — Saint Augustine

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming. — Haruki Murakami

All unnecessary vows are folly, because they suppose a prescience of the future, which has not been given us. — Samuel Johnson

In 1983 Colonel Burns wrote a poem in which he envisioned how his fledgling communications network might one day influence the world.

Imagine the emergence of a new meta-culture.
Imagine all kinds of people everywhere
getting committed to human excellence,
getting committed to closing the gap
between the human condition
and the human potential...
And imagine all of us hooked up
with a common high tech communications system.
That's a vision that brings tears to the eyes.
Human excellence is an ideal
that we can embed
into every formal human structure
on our planet.
And that's really why we're going to do this.
And that's also why
The Meta Network is a creation
we can love.

Notwithstanding Colonel Burns's failure to foresee that people would use the Internet mostly to access porn and look themselves up on Google, his prescience was admirable. — Jon Ronson

As to the Divine Design, is it not an instance of incomprehensibly and infinitely marvellous Wisdom and Design to have given certain laws to matter millions of ages ago, which have surely and precisely worked out, in the long course of those ages, those effects which He from the first proposed. Mr. Darwin's theory need not then to be atheistical, be it true or not; it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of Divine Prescience and Skill. Perhaps your friend has got a surer clue to guide him than I have, who have never studied the question, and I do not [see] that 'the accidental evolution of organic beings' is inconsistent with divine design - It is accidental to us, not to God. — John Henry Newman

There has also been the problem of the disquieting rumblings from my gut. I had a fearful prescience that something truly foul and hellish wishes to escape my fundament. I fight it as I would fight the very devil (who lives in the flat above) and so far I have managed to quell and contain my riotous innards. — Heide Goody

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the 'Cold War,' and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could not last. Very few people believed that this was the case: The best known anti-Communist to advance the proposition was the great Robert Conquest, but he himself insists that part of the credit for such prescience goes to Orwell. More recently, a very exact prefiguration of the collapse of the USSR was offered by two German Marxists, one of them from the West (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and one from the East (Rudolf Bahro, the accuracy of whose prediction was almost uncanny). I have never met an American conservative who has even heard of, let alone read, either of these authors. — Christopher Hitchens

Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Much as my Boomer friends will hate me for saying this, Kanye West is the New Dylan. Not only do Kanye's best lyrics match Dylan's prescience, highly inventive word-play and genius for storytelling, his indefatigable cockiness eerily channels Muhammad Ali. — Dan Hill

No one knows what the top-performing asset class will be next year. Lacking this prescience, your next-best solution is to own all of the classes and rebalance regularly. — Barry Ritholtz

In this work I have received the opposition of a number of men who only advocate the unobtainable because the immediately possible is beyond their moral courage, administrative ability, and their political prescience. — John Burns

Outsiders became keen to join an organization [European Community] that offered attractive bribes to the poor. Greece did so in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986. - written before 2003. — J.M. Roberts

The building is rather like a medieval Castle and was established in the Sixth Century and soon afterwards, as the Moslem armies advanced Westwards from the Arabian Peninsula, somebody had the prescience to build a small Mosque in its courtyard to guard against it being burned or demolished. At the time of the Crusades it was the turn of the Monastery to protect the Mosque, and so it has been down the ages, each House of God extending its shelter to the other as opposing armies came and went. — Ahdaf Soueif

It would be foolish to give credit to Euclid for pangeometrical conceptions; the idea of geometry deifferent from the common-sense one never occurred to his mind. Yet, when he stated the fifth postulate, he stood at the parting of the ways. His subconscious prescience is astounding. There is nothing comperable to it in the whole history of science. — George Sarton