Weekend Words: Predict
If you want to work out the kinks in predicting the weather, the Old Farmer's Almanac offers a number of folk remedies you can try.
If you want to work out the kinks in predicting the weather, the Old Farmer’s Almanac offers a number of folk remedies you can try, including persimmon seeds, pig spleens, goose bones and woolly bear caterpillars.
You can only predict things after they have happened.
—Eugene Ionesco, The Rhinoceros
Those who have knowledge don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.
—Lao Tzu
And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.
—Adrienne Rich, “Storm Warnings”
All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices.
—Ernest Hemingway
Often I find that poems predict what I’m going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.
—Erica Jong, interview, Time magazine
I think predictability has become the rule and I’m completely the opposite — I like spectators to be disturbed.
—Louis Malle
In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.
—Hannah Arendt
An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery.
—Enrico Fermi
In effect, we have redefined the task of science to be the discovery of laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limits set by the uncertainty principle.
—Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
The future is an unknown, but a somewhat predictable unknown. To look to the future we must first look back upon the past. That is where the seeds of the future were planted. I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
—Albert Einstein
The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.
—E.B. White
I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I’ll be all right; I’ve got a few veg.
—Margaret Drabble
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