A Quote by Rick Perlstein

I'm a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event - and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am.

Rick Perlstein

Quote Topics

Act Am Any Bigger Event Future Historian Me More Predicting Predicting The Future Prediction

Quote Author

Rick Perlstein
American - Historian
Born: 1969

Nobody wants a prediction that the future will be more or less like the present, even if that is, statistically speaking, an excellent prediction.

Nathan Myhrvold

I shall go further and say that even if an examination of the past could lead to any valid prediction concerning man's future, that prediction would be the contrary of reassuring.

Julien Benda

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're being asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

Michael Crichton

What differentiates human from lower-animal consciousness is time. You can't explain the concept of "tomorrow" to your dog. Our consciousness is dominated by time - We're constantly running simulations of the future. Our brain is a prediction machine. The hallmark of intelligence, indeed of genius, is the number and complexity of the feedback loops we use in predicting the future.

Michio Kaku

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.

Tom Hanks

There is no example of someone reading their scripture and saying, 'I have a prediction about the world that no one knows yet, because this gave me insight. Let's go test that prediction,' and have the prediction be correct.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.

Lee Simonson

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.

Rem Koolhaas

I find that predicting the course of our lives is like predicting the weather. You might be able to predict your future in the short term, but the longer you look ahead, the less likely you are to be correct.

Leonard Mlodinow

People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.

Ray Bradbury

Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not the only one. Explanation is also important, and there are plenty of sciences that do a lot of explaining and not much predicting.

Eric Maskin

People around me tell me that I need a bigger persona and to act a little more A-listy because 'that's where you are but you don't act that way, so people undervalue you.' But that's not me.

Eric Nam

Paradox is an overrated threat. There is...a quality similar to inertia at work. Once an event has occurred, there is an extremely strong tendency for that event to occur. The larger, more significant, or more energetic the event, the more it tends to remain as it originally happened, despite any interference." I frowned. "There's...a law of conservation of history?

Jim Butcher

I am not predicting here that Obama will fail like Jimmy Carter. What I am predicting is the Republican Party is not extinct and will after a period of time become a strong opposition party.