Forecasts Quotes

• Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

  Lord Kelvin

  Silly, Creativity, Science

  100 Copy quote

• The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?

  David Sarnoff

  Silly, Creativity, Dumb

  21 Copy quote

• We have long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune-tellers look good.

  Warren Buffett

  Long, Looks, Investing

  Warren Buffett (2009). “Warren Buffett on Business: Principles from the Sage of Omaha”, p.165, John Wiley & Sons

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• A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service: The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible.

  Frederick W. Smith

  Ideas, Yale, Order

  9 Copy quote

• A good portfolio is more than a long list of good stocks and bonds. It is a balanced whole, providing the investor with protections and opportunities with respect to a wide range of contingencies.

  Harry Markowitz

  Business, Opportunity, Long

  115 Copy quote

• Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.

  Warren Buffett

  Investing, May, Deals

  21 Copy quote

• How poor is the wisdom of men, and how uncertain their forecast!

  Teresa of Avila

  Wisdom, Men, Poor

  20 Copy quote

• Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a Speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one.

  George Orwell

  Jobs, Writing, Reality

  9 Copy quote

• Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Flare Up, Revolution, Brewing

  9 Copy quote

• When you know absolutely nothing about the topic, make your forecast by asking a carefully selected probability sample of 300 others who don't know the answer either.

  Edgar Fiedler

  Asking, Answers, Topics

  8 Copy quote

• If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.

  Nate Silver

  Thinking, Yesterday, Glory

  4 Copy quote

• Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Laughter, Taken, Weather

  Jean Baudrillard (1989). “America”, p.49, Verso

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• Make then your forecasts, my lords Astrologers, with your slavish physicians, by means of those astrolabes with which you seek to discern the fantastic nine moving spheres; in these you finally imprison your own minds, so that you appear to me but as parrots in a cage, while I watch you dancing up and down, turning and hopping within those circles.

  Giordano Bruno

  Moving, Mean, Circles

  "On the Infinite Universe and Worlds". Book by Giordano Bruno, 1584.

  16 Copy quote

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• We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children.

  Warren Buffett

  Children, Believe, Long

  Warren Buffett (2009). “Warren Buffett on Business: Principles from the Sage of Omaha”, p.165, John Wiley & Sons

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• Confidence in a forecast rises with the amount of information that goes into it. But the accuracy of the forecast stays the same.

  Dean Williams

  Investing, Information, Accuracy

  6 Copy quote

• If you have to forecast, forecast often.

  Edgar Fiedler

  Business, Ifs

  17 Copy quote

• Pundits forecast not because they know, but because they are asked.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Investing, Pundits, Knows

  9 Copy quote

• The only way to predict if there's a cloud on your horizon due to glaucoma is to get tested. No matter what the diagnosis, the forecast is for clear vision in the years ahead.

  Willard Scott

  Clouds, Years, Vision

  18 Copy quote

• Happy will be the men who, having the power and the love and the benevolent forecast to [create a park], will do it. They will not be forgotten. The trees and their lovers will sing their praises, and generations yet unborn will rise up and call them blessed.

  John Muir

  Blessed, Men, Tree

  John Muir (1988). “Northwest Passages - From the Pen of John Muir: In California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska”

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• A commonplace of political rhetoric has it that the quality of a civilization may be measured by how it cares for its elderly. Just as surely, the future of a society may be forecast by how it cares for its young.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Elderly, Civilization, Political

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1987). “Family and Nation: The Godkin Lectures, Harvard University”, Harcourt

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• You realise Group Captain that this might be the most important weather forecast in history?

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Weather, History, Historical

  4 Copy quote

• We are not, of course, optimistic about our chances of success. Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century. (The inability to forecast exactly which one - whether plague, famine, the poisoning of the oceans, drastic climatic change, or some disaster entirely unforeseen - is hardly grounds for complacency.)

  John Holdren

  War, Ocean, Optimistic

  4 Copy quote

• William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.

  Willa Cather

  Personality, Storm, Horizon

  Willa Cather (2014). “A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays”, p.42, Simon and Schuster

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• How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.

  Edmund White

  Book, Past, Sick

  "A Boy's Own Story". Book by Edmund White, 1982.

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• Forecasts usually tell us more of the forecaster than of the forecast

  Warren Buffett

  21 Copy quote