Prescient Quotes

Millennials in the workplace have been called "orchids"2 (can't survive outside the greenhouse) and "teacups"3 (chip easily and then are ruined), but to me the most prescient metaphor for young adults sent out into the world after being overparented is "veal" - a term coined by Massachusetts educator Joe Maruszczak - meaning they're raised in controlled environments and led, metaphorically, to slaughter. None of us took a course called "how to hold your kid back," but overparenting appears to be seriously poor preparation for life in the work world. In 2014, interested ~ Julie Lythcott-Haims

He grasped at a prescient feeling, akin to the dialectic of dreams, that this reunion could never come to pass, yet somehow
it most definitely would. ~ Kenzaburo Oe

Some prescient American collectors, including Vicki and Kent Logan and Mera and Donald Rubell, began collecting Chinese art before 2000 with a genuine passion, but as the auction prices exploded everyone was beating a path to the galleries and artist studios in China. It became the 'China thing.' ~ Arne Glimcher

Simply stated, the need for accurate intelligence and prescient analysis from CIA has never been greater than it is in 2013 - or than it will be in the coming years. ~ John O. Brennan

Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was buy Ireland. From each other. An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, has made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the property-related losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. (Think $10.6 trillion.) At the rate money flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for the next four years. ~ Michael Lewis

IF YOU ABOLISH THE DRAFT," said Owen Meany, "MOST AMERICANS WILL SIMPLY STOP CARING WHAT WE'RE DOING IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD ~ John Irving

Ginsberg turned out to be depressingly prescient when, after a heated argument with Norman Podhoretz in 1958, he yelled, 'We'll get you through your children!' For countless American families, that turned out to be only too true. ~ Roger Kimball

I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do, but when you try to deal with prescient themes in the present, that is what you're doing. ~ Quentin Tarantino

2001's production notes contain a number of startlingly prescient glimpses of the world we live in today. As of mid-1965, approximately the same time that the US Department of Defense was conceiving of the internet's direct predecessor, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), Kubrick's intrepid band of futurists had seemingly already visualized important aspects of the new technology's implications. One document sent from Tony Masters to Roger Caras on June 29 listed matter-of-factly - under a letterhead replete with the roaring MGM lion - nine props that he asked Caras to help him with. Number one was "2001 newspaper to be read on some kind of television screen. Should be designed television screen shape; i.e., wider than it is high. ~ Michael Benson

The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease. ~ Helen Keller

Gifted people of discernment, intelligence, and talent flourish in virtually every occupation. Every field produces perceptive and prescient persons whom exhibit the rare capacity to observe what eludes most people. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn't look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser. ~ Julian Barnes

Prescient woman called Meronym visited my dwellin' for a spell, an' nothin'd be the same, not in my life, not in the Valleys, nay, not never. ~ David Mitchell

In church it occurred to me that it is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many. It is not yet time to debate about the remedy. The previous question is as to the danger - the evil. Let the people be fully informed and convinced as to the evil. Let them earnestly seek the remedy and it will be found. Fully to know the evil is the first step towards reaching its eradication. Henry George is strong when he portrays the rottenness of the present system. We are, to say the least, not yet ready for his remedy. We may reach and remove the difficulty by changes in the laws regulating corporations, descents of property, wills, trusts, taxation, and a host of other important interests, not omitting lands and other property. ~ Rutherford B. Hayes

What is the elephant in all our rooms? It is the global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat even in old-established democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does capitalism. Americans and Europeans do it. Indians do it. Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes do it. Even Chinese communists do it ... Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, since some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalized capitalism. His prescription failed but his description was prescient. ~ Timothy Garton Ash

Growing up in a violent house makes you hypervigilant -- you do everything in your life to make sure the egg doesn't break. The vigilance, along with the depression and the demons I battle, it all mixes together and shows up in my work. I beat myself up when things get out of control. I was supposed to be watching over it. Even more disturbing is the realization that I alone can create an utterly hopeless catastrophe. The only way to control it is to create it. Write it and it shall be so -- the prescient thought. ~ Bob Mould

As political theorist Michael Parenti points out, historians often overlook Fascism's economic agenda
the partnership between Big Capital and Big Government
in their analysis of its authoritarian social program. Indeed, according to Bertram Gross in his startlingly prescient Friendly Fascism (1980), it is possible to achieve fascist goals within an ostensibly democratic society. ~ Richard Heinberg

Grand visions, even those as prescient as Washington's, must nevertheless negotiate the damnable particularities that history in the short run tosses up before history in the long run arrives to validate the vision. ~ Joseph J. Ellis

So I telled her my 'maginin's o' places from old books'n'pics in the school'ry. Lands where the Fall'd never falled, towns bigger'n all o' Big I. an' towers o' stars'n'suns blazin' higher'n Mauna Kea, bays of not jus' one Prescient Ship but a mil'yun, Smart boxes what make delish grinds more'n anyun can eat, Smart Pipes what gush more brew'n anyun can drink, places where it's always spring an' no sick, no knucklyin' an' no slavin'. Places where ev'ryun's a beautsome purebirth who lives to be one hun'erd'n'fifty years. ~ David Mitchell

Nowadays people talk about PayPal's founders as prescient geniuses who would inevitably change the world. It was, however, not so obvious that PayPal would taste its first major success by helping people sell Beanie Babies on eBay. But they had a vision, a hope, and the perseverance to try multiple iterations until they got it right. ~ Eric Ries

Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient. ~ Jaron Lanier

They were quiet for a while, eating, then Oromis asked, "Can you tell me, What is the most important mental tool a person can possess?"
It was a serious question, and Eragon considered it for a reasonable span before he ventured to say, "Determination."
Oromis tore the loaf in half with his long white fingers. "I can understand why you arrived at that conclusion-determination has served you well in your adventures-but no. I meant the tool most necessary to choose the best course of action in any given situation. Determination is as common among men who are dull and foolish as it is among those who are brilliant intellects. So, no, determination cannot be what we're looking for. ~ Christopher Paolini

When I see your picture in its frame,
A strait jacket, pity rises in me,
And stronger than pity, revulsion.
It is as if you had never been.

Nobody in the world can know your love,
You are strapped to the nothingness of ages,
Nobody can will you into life,
It is as if you had never been.

I cannot break your anonymity,
The absolute has imprisoned you,
Most sentient, most prescient, most near.
It is as if you had never been. ~ Richard Eberhart

And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: "Manual of internal culture for external barbarians." The opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed its primitive inner needs. For what means has nature of repressing too great a luxuriance from without? Only one, - to be affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside and stamp it out at the first opportunity. And so we have the custom of no longer taking real things seriously, we get the feeble personality on which the real and the permanent make so little impression. Men become at last more careless and accommodating in external matters, and the [Pg 34] considerable cleft between substance and form is widened; until they have no longer any feeling for barbarism, if only their memories be kept continually titillated, and there f ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Prescient experts of biological codes. ~ Sarah Hall

Science has grown frightfully audacious in these days
swift-footed, ponderous, careering over her iron ways with unslacking pace. This rampant dragon, on which I am mounted, see how he bends his once stiff neck to his rider, champing his checked bit and pawing the dust, impatient to leap around the globe. Genius is prescient, foresees its own might. Man is striving through these iron-ribbed, steam-sped hippogriffs, to recover his lost ubiquity and omnipotence, and threatens soon to grasp in his ample palm, and fix with flaming eye-ball, the elemental forces! ~ Amos Bronson Alcott

Never till this day Did life disturb the dense eternity Of joyless quiet; never skylark's song, Or storm-bird's prescient scream, or eaglet's cry, Made vital the gross fog. The very light Is but an alien that can find no welcome ~ Hartley Coleridge

Ludwig's enormous, awe-inspiring genius, his productivity, his prescient modernism were all contained in music. Beside that, the letters to the Immortal Beloved looked no more impressive to her than bathroom stall graffiti: L.V.B. luvs his I.B. Wishes she wuz here. ~ Magnus Flyte

When once it is no longer possible to understand how a man gives his life for his country--and the time will come--then all is over with that faith also, and the idea of the Fatherland is dead; and then, perhaps, we shall be envied, as we envy the saints their inward and irresistible strength. ~ Ernst Junger

In Lewis Carroll's poem, when the hunters finally capture the deceptive Snark, it reveals itself not to be a foreign beast, but one of the human hunters sent to trap it. And so it had turned out with cancer. Cancer genes came from within the human genome. Indeed the Greeks had been peculiarly prescient yet again in their use of the term oncos. Cancer was intrinsically "loaded" in our genome. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Demons was as prescient a warning regarding the disaster about to befall Russia as Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was about that cataclysm. On the eve of the French Revolution, Burke cautioned that "criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred." He said the moment one capitulates to the idea that mayhem and murder are justified for the greater good, the greater good is forgotten and mayhem and murder become ends in themselves, until only violence can "satiate their insatiable appetites."50 ~ Ann Coulter

Lincoln had a stubborn concern for first principles. ~ Richard Brookhiser

Fukuyama's thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a 'terminal beach' was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the 'oversaturation of an age with history'. 'It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself', he wrote in Untimely Meditations, 'and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism', in which 'cosmopolitan fingering', a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche's Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness. ~ Mark Fisher