Quote

Forecasting our futures is built into our psyches because we will soon have to manage that future. We have no choice. No matter how often we fail, we can never stop trying.

— Alan Greenspan

Sentiment: POSITIVE

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✓Similar Perspectives

We are both disturbed and fascinated by visions of bleak futures, predictions of what might come if we as a society aren't careful.

— Marie Lu

The affairs of this world are so shifting and depend on so many accidents, that it is hard to form any judgment concerning the future; nay, we see from experience that the forecasts even of the wise almost always turn out false.

— Francesco Guicciardini

But before looking to the future, let's glance back at the road we've traveled these past two years because that is the source of much of the optimism we are all feeling about the future.

— Linda Lingle

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

— Laurent Jalabert

The future will take care of itself. My plans have fallen flat. Nothing that I planned has worked for me so far. So I don't plan anymore. I keep short-term plans.

— Juhi Chawla

The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.

— Lewis Thomas

✗Opposing Perspectives

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

— Freeman Dyson

People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.

— Alan Greenspan

Humans are terrible at predicting the future. We really overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term... If we can glimpse even a couple of years into the future, even that's difficult to do.

— Bill Maris

The most reliable way to forecast the future is to try to understand the present.

— John Naisbitt