Foresight Quotes

“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Our bodies have five senses: touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing. But not to be overlooked are the senses of our souls: intuition, peace, foresight, trust, empathy. The differences between people lie in their use of these senses; most people don't know anything about the inner senses while a few people rely on them just as they rely on their physical senses, and in fact probably even more.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.”
― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

“Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.”
― Alain de Botton

“The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.”
― William S. Burroughs

“How you look at it is pretty much how you'll see it”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.”
― Joanne Harris, Runemarks

“All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days . . .nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”
― John F. Kennedy

“In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions."

[Why Societies Collapse, ABC Local, July 17, 2003]”
― Jared Diamond

“No matter how tiny you look, you can lead huge men if you have what the huge men don't have.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“One can have only as much preparation as he has foresight.”
― Jim Butcher, Changes

“Full moon is falling through the sky.
Cranes fly through clouds.
Wolves howl. I cannot find rest
Because I am powerless
To amend a broken world.

Sima Zian added, "I love the man who wrote that, I told you before, but there is so much burden in Chan Du. Duty, assuming all tasks, can betray arrogance. The idea we can know what must be done, and do it properly. We cannot know the future, my friend. It claims so much to imagine we can. And the world is not broken any more than it always, always is.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“The mind can never foresee its own advance”
― Hayek. F. A.

“A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree. This would demonstrate that he was indeed a seer.”
― Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

“We ought to live each day as though
it were our last day here below.
But if I did, alas, I know
it would have killed me long ago.”
― Piet Hein

“Humans are often credited with having real foresight, in distinction to the rest of biology which does not. For example, Dawkins compares the 'blind watchmaker' of natural selection with the real human one. 'A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection . . . has no purpose in mind'.

I think this distinction is wrong. There is no denying that the human watchmaker is different from the natural one. We humans, by virtue of having memes, can think about cogs, and wheels, and keeping time, in a way that animals cannot. Memes are the mind tools with which we do it. But what memetics shows us is that the processes underlying the two kinds of design are essentially the same. They are both evolutionary processes that give rise to design through selection, and in the process they produce what looks like foresight.”
― Susan J. Blackmore, The Meme Machine

“Foresight of phenomenon and power over them depend on knowledge of their sequences, and not upon any notion we may have formed respecting their origin or inmost nature.”
― John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism

“Complexity flies in the face of what is merely complicated, imposing limitations to our understanding.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“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, Reviews

“Until you are clear nothing will be. The moment you are clear everything will be.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru, Soul Trader

“Domino effects give way to butterfly effects given nonlinearity. “Outsized” conflates with “unpredictable” as a small cause yields disproportionate effects.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“Scenarios are dynamic living narratives, and require updating as the world itself evolves.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“The objective is not to get the future right. Rather, our work spurs better preparation for any of the futures which may arise.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“The issue with uncompromising reliance on flawed assumptions is not being wrong, but being unprepared for alternative outcomes.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“If we are to remain relevant, we need to build antifragile foundations to prepare for disruption and benefit from any disorder.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“The imagined suppression of uncertainty is nothing more than a mirage… The future is unknown, and we all constantly make assumptions. But to rely on assumptions as if they were certainty is irresponsible.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“As we destabilize the planetary systems we rely on for survival, the strain on our planet mirrors that in societies. These imbalances reinforce each other, amplifying the challenges.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“If we are to remain relevant and not delegate our strategic decision-making to machines, we must create innovative social and economic ecosystems that become stronger under stress and through shocks.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“Humans need to enhance their capabilities, as machines are learning fast, gaining increasingly higher-level human functions.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“This here is your inheritance, says the senior partner. Yes, he says, Ludwig, I know, and stows the plan for the bathing house (5.5m long, 3.8m wide, outer wall construction: wood, roof construction: thatch), stows both the plan and the mosquito in his briefcase. On a German shelf, this mosquito, pressed flat between large quantities of paper, will outlast time and times, and one day it might even be petrified, who knows.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation