Foreseeing Quotes

Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary--he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived.

Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us. ~ Benjamin Carter Hett

Women particularly should concern themselves with peace because men by nature are more foolhardy and headstrong, and their overwhelming desire to avenge themselves prevents them from foreseeing the resulting dangers and terrors of war. But woman by nature is more gentle and circumspect. Therefore, if she has sufficient will and wisdom she can provide the best possible means to pacify man. ~ Christine De Pizan

O, lawdy, seems you don't got good radar when it comes to pickin' 'em," Elvira muttered.
"No, her radar is beyond not good. Her radar is also not malfunctioning. It's straight out broke," Martha agreed and I was wondering if perhaps Elvira and Martha were not such a good match. Denver was relatively peaceful. I'd never heard of riots or sieges or militant hostile takeovers of land and I was foreseeing this if these two got together and rallied the female population of the Denver Metropolitan Area as a protest to shelter all women against dickhead assholes. ~ Kristen Ashley

This emphasis on the difference between intentions and ultimate results constituted an implicit critique of the Christian and civic republican traditions, and continues to make moralists queasy. Both traditions had stressed the importance of good and benevolent intentions. By unlinking consequences from intentions, Smith called into question the necessity and possibility of elevating the economic behavior of individuals through preaching and propaganda.
Yet just as he transmuted the Christian virtue of charity into the secular virtue of benevolence, on another level Smith preserved the classic republican concern for the common good. Those who could be motivated to devote themselves to promoting the public interest were in need of superior reason and understanding, by which we are capable of discerning the remote consequences of all our actions, and of foreseeing the advantage or detriment which is likely to result from them. ~ Jerry Z. Muller

The whole business is the crudest sort of stratagem, since we have no way of foreseeing it to the end. It is a mere paying out of rope on the chance that somewhere along the length of it will be a noose. ~ Isaac Asimov

They were in good spirits, scrubbed and combed, clean shirts all. Each foreseeing a night of drink, perhaps of love. How many youths have come home cold and dead from just such nights and just such plans. ~ Cormac McCarthy

The true threat to the world today comes from the mad ambitions of states and capitalists bent on destroying non-modern cultures. It is the so-called developed countries that plunder the planet's resources without showing the least concern for consequences they are incapable of foreseeing. ~ Rene Girard

While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life's joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world's sorrows, tasting the coming joy. ~ Timothy Keller

In one department of his [Joseph Black's] lecture he exceeded any I have ever known, the neatness and unvarying success with which all the manipulations of his experiments were performed. His correct eye and steady hand contributed to the one; his admirable precautions, foreseeing and providing for every emergency, secured the other. I have seen him pour boiling water or boiling acid from a vessel that had no spout into a tube, holding it at such a distance as made the stream's diameter small, and so vertical that not a drop was spilt. While he poured he would mention this adaptation of the height to the diameter as a necessary condition of success. I have seen him mix two substances in a receiver into which a gas, as chlorine, had been introduced, the effect of the combustion being perhaps to produce a compound inflammable in its nascent state, and the mixture being effected by drawing some string or wire working through the receiver's sides in an air-tight socket. The long table on which the different processes had been carried on was as clean at the end of the lecture as it had been before the apparatus was planted upon it. Not a drop of liquid, not a grain of dust remained. ~ Henry Peter Brougham

At present, however, science, spurred on by its powerful delusion, is hurrying unstoppably to its limits, where the optimism hidden in the essence oflogic will founder and break up. For there is an infinite number ofpoints on the periphery ofthe circle ofscience, and while we have no way of foreseeing how the circle could ever be completed, a noble and gifted man inevitably encounters, before the mid-point of his existence, boundary points on the periphery like this, where he stares into that which cannot be illuminated. When, to his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail, then a new form ofknowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and as medicine."
Friedrich Nietzsche, "Foreword to Richard Wagner" in The Birth of Tragedy, ed. R. Geuss & R. Speirs, Cambridge, 2007, 163. (p.114) ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Better not to do than to do, better to meditate than to act, better his astrophysics, the threshold of the Unkowable, than my chemistry, a mess compounded of stenches, explosions and small futile mysteries. I thought of another moral, more down to earth and concrete, and I believe that every militant chemist can confirm it: that one must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost he same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened_, the practically identica, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. the difference can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad's switch points; the chemist's trade consists in good part in being aware of these differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist's trade. ~ Primo Levi

We call the fates of the Titanic and the Concordia - as well as those of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia - 'accidents.' Foreseeing such undesirable events is what engineers are expected to do. However, design trade-offs leave technological systems open to failings once predicted, but later forgotten. ~ Henry Petroski

Nature consists of facts and of regularities, and is in itself neither moral nor immoral. It is we who impose our standards upon nature, and who in this way introduce morals into the natural world, in spite the fact that we are part of this world. We are products of nature, but nature has made us together with our power of altering the world, of foreseeing and of planning for the future, and of making far-reaching decisions for which we are morally responsible. Yet, responsibility, decisions, enter the world of nature only with us ~ Karl Popper

Storm Warnings

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of grey unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

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.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions. ~ Adrienne Rich

But all these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event has justified them. If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousands and millions of suggestions and supposition are now forgotten that were current at the period, but have been shown by time to be unfounded and so have been consigned to oblivion. ~ Leo Tolstoy

What interest, in fact, can this depressing work have for the worker, when he knows that the fate awaiting him from the cradle to the grave will be to live in mediocrity, poverty, and insecurity of the morrow? Therefore, when we see the immense majority of men take up their wretched task every morning, we feel surprised at their perseverance, at their zeal for work, at the habit that enables them, like machines blindly obeying an impetus given, to lead this life of misery without hope for the morrow; without foreseeing ever so vaguely that some day they, or at least their children, will be part of a humanity rich in all the treasures of a bountiful nature, in all the enjoyments of knowledge, scientific and artistic creation, reserved to-day to a few privileged favourites. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

By making careful preparations, by foreseeing possibilities, Doc hoped to make this party as non-lethal as possible without making it dull. ~ John Steinbeck

Sound economy is a sound understanding brought into action; it is calculation realized; it is the doctrine of proportion reduced to practice; it is foreseeing contingencies, and providing against them. ~ Hannah More

The threats that resurfaced in the past 10 years were not an aberration. Al Qaeda and terrorism or one such threat, but it was actually not the most serious threat that the United States faced. The president can and should speak of foreseeing an era in which these threats don't exist, but you must not believe his own rhetoric. To the contrary, he must gradually ease the country away from the idea that threats to imperial power will ever subside, then l lead it to an understanding that these threats are the price Americans pay for the wealth and power they hold. ~ George Friedman

Foreseeing the needs of His children, a loving Heavenly Father placed directions and rescuers along their way. He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to make safe passage possible and visible. ~ Henry B. Eyring

God decreed to save and damn certain particular persons. This decree has its foundation in the foreknowledge of God, by which he knew from all eternity those individuals who would, through his preventing [going before] grace, believe, and, through his subsequent grace would persevere by which foreknowledge, he likewise knew those who would not believe and persevere. ~ Jacobus Arminius

An eternal life is a life that one lives according to his or her decree to ultimately be a fine human being, agreeing with the concept of goodness, foreseeing the dangers ahead either by prophesies or by anticipation and to serve our Heavenly Father unselfishly. ~ Anthony Pan

Prometheus: Yes, I stopped mortals from foreseeing their doom.
Chorus: What cure did you discover for that sickness?
Prometheus: I sowed in them blind hopes. ~ David Grene

The swan is not without cause dedicated to Apollo, because foreseeing his happiness in death, he dies with singing and pleasure. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing - or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God - the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a "host" who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and "take advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves. ~ C.S. Lewis

Foreseeing is not understanding, else surely the prophecy latent in man would come oftener to the surface! ~ George MacDonald

FORSEEING: Foreseeing is done by those MAGIC USERS with the GIFT of looking into the future, quite often MYSTICAL MASTERS. It is done unasked. Indeed, most people would rather not know. But unlike the other forms of PROPHECY, this is usually very obscure, although quite accurate. Tourists should not lose sleep over it. Whatever is Foreseen is going to happen anyway. ~ Diana Wynne Jones

Foreseeing the future, I would later learn, means nothing if there is nothing to be done to prevent it. ~ Leslye Walton

Thus the 'fortune-teller' is trying to foresee something that is really quite unforeseeable. This is characteristic of all forms of foreseeing. And precisely because what they 'see' is so vague, it is hard to repudiate fortune-tellers' claims. ~ Jostein Gaarder

Two kinds of people are good at foreseeing danger: those who have learned at their own expense, and the clever people who learn a great deal at the expense of others. ~ Baltasar Gracian

Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes - circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result they marvel at the monster ball and wonder how the contriving of it came to be originally thought out and planned. Whereas there was no such planning, there was only a law: the ball once started, all the circumstances that happened to lie in its path would help to build it, in spite of themselves. ~ Mark Twain

The social leaders who refuse to allow politics into society are as foreseeing as the soldiers who refuse to allow politics to permeate the army. Society is like the sexual appetite; one does not know at what forms of perversion it may not arrive, once we have allowed our choice to be dictated by aesthetic considerations. ~ Marcel Proust

We are not capable of foreseeing the creative possibilities that this kind of deconstruction - the deconstruction of the old sacrificial system - produces. I think that we must examine our history and try to see whether, beneath what has already occurred, there are not additional layers of phenomena waiting to be revealed; whether some aspects of life that used to be constrained by the old sacrificial system are not going to flourish, other domains of knowledge, other ways of living. Everything that the Passion undid in the cultural sphere might well be an opening, an extraordinary source of enrichment. I am certain it is. One must also keep in mind what Jesus called the "signs of the times."4 ~ Rene Girard

Most men are not wicked. Men become bad and guilty because they speak and act without foreseeing the results of their words and their deeds. They are sleepwalkers, not evildoers. ~ Franz Kafka

Memory has many conveniences, and, among others, that of foreseeing things as they have afterwards happened. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon

I was resting in the shadow of that ideal happiness as in the shade of the poisonous manchineel tree, without foreseeing the consequences. ~ Gustave Flaubert