Foresee Quotes
More Foresee Quotes
Philadelphia was the first city to foresee the advantages of a Federal constitution and oatmeal as a breakfast food.
christopher morley— Travels in Philadelphia (1920)
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Isaac Asimov— 1975 'How Easy To See The Future', in Natural History, Apr.
I can foresee no circumstance in which I would allow my name to be put forward for the leadership of the Conservative Party.
Heseltine, Michael Ray Dibdin Heseltine, Baron— 1990 Said on numerous occasions in the autumn.
I foresee great refinements in the field of short-pulse microwave signaling, whereby several simultaneous programs may occupy the same channel, in sequence, with incredibly swift electronic communication; vastly important developments in microwave technique, whereby present clumsy connecting leads between wall or floor sockets and electric devices like toasters and vacuum sweepers may become unnecessary; gigantic magnetrons and klystrons, or their successors, will generate megawatts in microwaves; living rooms and their occupants will be heated by high-frequency waves from walls or ceilings; short waves will be generally used in the kitchen for roasting and baking, almost instantaneously
Lee De Forest— "Dawn of the Electronic Age", Popular Mechanics, January 1952
In terms of earthly life as you understand it, it is overly optimistic to imagine that eventually all illnesses will be conquered, all relationships be inevitably fulfilling, or to foresee a future in which all people on earth are treated with equality and respect.
jane roberts— Chapter 9, The Way Toward Health, by Jane Roberts (1970). ISBN 1-878424-30-0
Avarice and injustice are always shortsighted, and they did not foresee how much this regulation must obstruct improvement, and thereby hurt in the long-run the real interest of the landlord.
Adam Smith— Chapter II, p. 426-427
Very belatedly in 1947, Darwin [Sir Charles Darwin, great-grandson of the famous Charles Darwin] agreed to set up a very small electronics group [...] It was not easy to have the imagination to foresee that computers were to become one of the most important developments of the century.
— Oral history interview by John C. Nash, SIAM History of Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Project[1], 13 July 1984
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Isaac Asimov— "How Easy to See the Future", Natural History magazine (April 1975); later published in Asimov on Science Fiction (1981).
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
jorge luis borges— Variant translation: I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left... Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
e. m. forster— "The Tercentenary of the 'Areopagitica'"
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.
aldous huxley— Chapter 4 (pp. 35-36)
A doctrine is something that pins you down to a given mode of conduct and dozens of situations which you cannot foresee, which is a great mistake in principle. When the word ‘containment’ was used in my ‘X’ article, it was used with relation to a certain situation then prevailing, and as a response to it.
george f. kennan— As quoted in "George Kennan Speaks Out About Iraq" at History News Network (26 September 2002)
Thou mayest foresee... the things which will be. For they will certainly be of like form, and it is not possible that they should deviate from the order of things now: accordingly to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years.
marcus aurelius— VII, 49. (Book VII)
In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.
Arthur Schopenhauer— "On the Sufferings of the World"
As the antagonism between those who possess, and those who do not, is becoming more acute day after day, we can already foresee a moment when it will bring about ("entraînera", Fr.) severe (big, high, intense, - "grands", Fr.) disasters, if we do turn (direct, aim, - "dirige", Fr.) life in time the social life in new directions (or ways, - "dans des voies nouvelles", Fr.)
african spir— p. 46 (Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937))
To understand Cézanne is to foresee Cubism. Henceforth we are justified in saying that between this school and previous manifestations there is only a difference of intensity, and that in order to assure ourselves of this we have only to study the methods of this realism, which, departing from the superficial reality of Courbet, plunges with Cézanne into profound reality, growing luminous as it forces the unknowable to retreat.
— Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Du "Cubisme", Edition Figuière, Paris, 1912 (First English edition: Cubism, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1913)
There is no providence or wisdom of man, nor of any council of men that can foresee and provide for all events and variety of cases, that will or may arise upon the making of a new law.
— Sir Robert Atkyns, L.C.B., Trial of Sir Edward Halet (1686), 11 How. St. Tr. 1208.
Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.
— Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Citadelle or The Wisdom of the Sands (1948)
I do not want to foresee the future . I am concerned with taking care of the present . God has given me no control over the moment following.
— Mahatma Gandhi, in Anthony Parel Gandhi, Freedom, and Self-rule, Lexington Books, 1 January 2000, p.59
Many people, no doubt, honestly believe that they are only giving away the interests of Czechoslovakia, whereas I fear we shall find that we have deeply compromised, and perhaps fatally endangered, the safety and even the independence of Great Britain and France.... I foresee and foretell that the policy of submission will carry with it restrictions upon the freedom of speech and debate in Parliament, on public platforms, and discussions in the Press.
— Winston Churchill, speech in Parliament attacking Prime Minister Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Hitler.[ ]
I had long since insisted upon interpreting the things that Fate forced me to do as victories of my own will and intelligence, and now this bad habit had grown into a sort of frenzied arrogance. In the nature of what I was calling my intelligence there was a touch of something illegitimate, a touch of the sham pretender who has been placed on the throne by some freak chance. This dolt of a usurper could not foresee the revenge that would inevitably be wreaked upon his stupid despotism.
yukio mishima— p. 220 (Confessions of a Mask (1949))
