Foresight Quotes - Page 5

• not wholly consciously, but not quite unconsciously, as far as I can remember, I determined to fashion my future as a sculptor his marble, and there was in it the same mixture of foresight and the unknown. The thing in the mind of the artist takes its way and imposes its form as it wakens under his hand. And so with life.

  Freya Stark

  Fashion, Artist, Hands

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• Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.

  Grace Paley

  Doe, Facts, Hindsight

  Grace Paley (2017). “A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry”, p.158, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• No organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically applicable to every question which may occur in practical administration. .. No foresight can anticipate nor any document of reasonable length contain express provisions for all possible questions.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Law, May, Administration

  Abraham Lincoln (1991). “Great Speeches”, p.57, Courier Corporation

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• A real sacrifice involves a radical change in the character of a game which cannot be effected without foresight, fantasy, and the willingness to risk.

  Leonid Shamkovich

  Real, Character, Sacrifice

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• The hope for the twentieth century rests on recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned (materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices) and going back to other characteristics that our Western Society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding a increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self discipline.

  Carroll Quigley

  War, Compassion, Men

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• Whilst large organisations need foresight, they are also notorious in their bias for short term thinking, sometimes rejecting or even suppressing foresight.

  Tom Graves

  Thinking, Needs, Sometimes

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• According to their [Newton and his followers] doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God's making, so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as clockmaker mends his work.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  God, Moving, Wind

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• Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.

  Edmund Burke

  Years, Evil, Half

  Edmund Burke, Christian ENGLISH (pseud.) (1861). “Liberation tested by Philosophy and Experience. In “Reflections on the French Revolution,” etc. [The dedication signed: Christian English.]”, p.14

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• The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

  Clive James

  Hindsight, Inevitable, Belittle

  Clive James (2008). “Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts”, p.180, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Believe, Men, Essence

  "The White House Years". Book by Henry Kissinger, 1979.

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• We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foresight of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement.

  Edward Abbey

  Dream, Agony, Feet

  "The Monkey Wrench Gang". Book by Edward Abbey (p. 312), August 1, 1975.

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• There is just no way any management with any intelligence and foresight cannot recognize the value of a corporate image. It is the best, single marketable investment that a company can make.

  Malcolm Forbes

  Single, Way, Management

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• Ultimately, we are all products of the experiences we have and the decisions we make as children, and it remains a peculiar detail of human condition that something as precious as the future is entrusted to us when we possess so little foresight. Perhaps that's what makes hindsight so intriguing. When you're young the future is a blank canvas, but looking back you are always able to see the big picture.

  Simon Pegg

  Children, Decisions We Make, Details

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• Solicitous care for living things affords satisfaction to one of the most lively instincts of the child's mind. Nothing is better calculated than this to awaken an attitude of foresight.

  Maria Montessori

  Children, Attitude, Mind

  Maria Montessori (2004). “The Discovery of the Child”, p.92, Aakar Books

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• I knew I was destined to be a rock star. I just knew it, like I've always had the power of foresight. I feel right now exactly the way I felt after I finished mixing my first solo album 'New York Groove'.

  Ace Frehley

  New York, Stars, Rocks

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• The essential factor of military success is speed, that is taking advantage of others' unpreparedness or lack of foresight, their failure to catch up, going by routes they do not expect, attacking where they are not on guard. This you cannot accomplish with hesitation.

  Sun Tzu

  Art, Military, War

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• It is easy to act as a Saturday morning quarterback and replay the game lost the night before. All of us seem to have better hindsight (the ability to see after the event what should have been done) than foresight

  Carlos E. Asay

  Morning, Future, Night

  Carlos E. Asay (1994). “The road to somewhere: a guide for young men and women”, Bookcraft Pubs

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• **New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23

  Gary Hamel

  Lying, Ambition, Innovation

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• Sometimes the crime follows the punishment, which only serves to prove the foresight of the Great God." "That's what my grandmother used to say," said Brutha automatically. "Indeed? I would like to know more about this formidable lady." "She used to give me a thrashing every morning because I would certainly do something to deserve it during the day," said Brutha. "A most complete understanding of the nature of mankind.

  Terry Pratchett

  Morning, Grandmother, Punishment

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• I'm cursed with the gift of foresight.

  Steven Morrissey

  Cursed

  "Morrissey interview: Big mouth strikes again". Interview with Simon Armitage, www.theguardian.com. September 3, 2010.

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• Acknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world - water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution - if we tackle them with courage and foresight.

  Jimmy Carter

  Future, Mean, Sacrifice

  United States. President (1977-1981 : Carter), Jimmy Carter, United States. Office of the Federal Register (1982). “Jimmy Carter”

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• Pity is often a reflection of our own evils in the ills of others. It is a delicate foresight of the troubles into which we may fall.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Fall, Reflection, Evil

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• The modern welfare state, highly touted as soaking the rich to subsidize the poor, does no such thing. In fact, soaking the rich would have disastrous effects, not just for the rich but for the poor and middle classes themselves. For it is the rich who provide a proportionately greater amount of saving, investment capital, entrepreneurial foresight, and financing of technological innovation that has brought the Unites States to by far the highest standard of living - for the mass of the people - of any country in history.

  Murray Rothbard

  Country, Class, People

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• The idea that the profits of capital are really the rewards of a just society for the foresight and thrift of those who sacrificed the immediate pleasures of spending in order that society might have productive capital, had a certain validity in the early days of capitalism, when productive enterprise was frequently initiated through capital saved out of modest incomes.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Order, Ideas, Income

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2013). “Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics”, p.125, Westminster John Knox Press

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• [Industrialism's soon diminishing] capacity to supply human needs could be prevented if men exercised any restraint or foresight in their present frenzied exploitation.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Needs, Capacity

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