Top 212 Speculative Quotes & Sayings

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

If speculative ideas can not be tested, they're not science; they don't even rise to the level of being wrong.

A speculative despair is unpardonable where it our duty to act.

... scientific research is compounded of ... empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning.

Let us be dreamers, thinkers, speculative philosophers, or as our spouses would have it: Idiots

Theologians have felt no hesitation in founding a system of speculative thought on the teachings of Jesus; and yet Jesus was never an inhabitant of the realm of speculative thought.

I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.

Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact.

I'll tell you an explanation that I find commonly overrated and speculative in the extreme: the idea that things that succeed in popular culture do that because they hit the temper of the times.

Speculative stock movements are carried too far in both directions, frequently in the general market and at all times in at least some of the individual issues.

In reality, no one knows what the market will do; trying to predict it is a waste of time, and investing based upon that prediction is a speculative undertaking.

Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.

An early fascination with higher mathematics at the university level blossomed into speculative thinking that could provide a basis for dealing with economic issues.

The risks are far greater to your child of not getting immunized than any kind of speculative potential relationship between the vaccine and the development of autism.

Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.

Attempts to estimate the impacts of climate change continue to be highly speculative.

I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.

A new and speculative idea, which although it may seem trivial and almost laughable, is nonetheless of great value in quickening the spirit of invention.

I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.

Books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight.

The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks - ways of thinking analytically - are tied to nature's laws.

With uncertainty in oil markets, a buildup of speculative pressures and the large U.S. current account deficit, there is a real possibility that Paulson's crisis-management skills will be tested.

I've always believed that a speculative bubble need not lead to a recession, as long as interest rates are cut quickly enough to stimulate alternative investments. But I had to face the fact that speculative bubbles usually are followed by recessions. My excuse has been that this was because the policy makers moved too slowly - that central banks were typically too slow to cut interest rates in the face of a burst bubble, giving the downturn time to build up a lot of momentum.

My final remark to young women and men going into experimental science is that they should pay little attention to the speculative physics ideas of my generation. After all, if my generation has any really good speculative ideas, we will be carrying these ideas out ourselves.

Scottish operative lodges began in the seventeenth century to admit non-operative members as accepted or gentleman masons and that by the early eighteenth century in some lodges the accepted or gentleman masons had gained the ascendancy: those lodges became, in turn speculative lodges, whilst others continued their purely operative nature. The speculative lodges eventually combined to form the Grand Lodge of Scotland in 1736.

The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years, including recurrent speculative episodes. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that we're now having another one of those speculative episodes.

A maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is merely speculative; a "principle" carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective.

Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.

He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

I love David Bohm. I started to get into speculative realism because I started reading his work.

My special pleasure in mathematics rested particularly on its purely speculative part.

It's also interesting to notice that most of the best Finnish speculative writers are women.

We are not to consider ourselves, while here, as at church or school, to listen to the harangues of speculative piety; we are here to talk of the political interests committed to our charge.

I read and write speculative fiction because I want to go someplace really different.

This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion.

At bottom each “exact” science is, and must be speculative, and its chief tool of research, too rarely used with both courage and judgement, is the regulated imagination.

Speculation in land may be necessary to capitalism, but speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself.

I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.

Love is no ingredient in a merely speculative faith, but it is the life and soul of a practical faith.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

Concentrating wealth in the hands of the few and deregulating financial institutions and practices lead to speculative bubbles that eventually burst — and that brings the whole country down.

Never mingle your speculative and investment operations in the same account nor in any part of your thinking.

Alternatives to gold and currency and to make a big speculative vehicle - I never considered for one second having anything to do with it. I detested it the minute it had been raised.

The Singaporean speculative tradition is different. Singapore doesn't conceive itself as the centre of the world or the one country that's going to save the world, so there's a different tone that comes out in the way speculative fiction is done. That's refreshing to read.

No nation can say, 'We will capitulate to tyranny rather than accept a speculative fate - to accept an absolute fate in alternative to a speculative one' - no nation can do that.

Until you separate the speculative behaviour of the financial sector from the real economy and the financing of the real economy, then we are not going to see the kind of stability or the capacity to drive genuine, income-led growth as opposed to debt-fuelled, speculative behaviour.

The history of science is everywhere speculative. It is a marvelous hiatory. It makes you proud to be a human being.

Man is constituted as a speculative being; he contemplates the world, and the objects around him, not with a passive indifferent eye, but as a system disposed with order and design.

I think teens are drawn to these speculative books that portray what might happen and what could happen.

I believe in poetic discourse, in the value of speech in a non-naturalistic way; it's speculative.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.

My last book was speculative. I just don't quite know what I am doing. But I'll get there. I have a list of things I would love to write.

Poetic and speculative photographs can result if one works carefully and accurately, yet letting chance relationships have full play.

I have argued that the Soviet story is one of the interaction of speculative excess or utopian aspirations with refractory reality.

I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.

I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.

I love incredibly imaginative, speculative sci-fi.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of the few and deregulating financial institutions and practices lead to speculative bubbles that eventually burst - and that brings the whole country down.

No degree of speculative knowledge of religion is any certain sign of true piety.

Speculative fiction is where my heart lies. It's what I read growing up, and it's what I read as an adult.