Speculation Quotes

“Just the class division of society creates two different, two parallel worlds/antipodes in this very society. And this means yet two polar models of behavior in the political life of the society—the democracy of the rich class is in fact a dictatorship for the poor one! In other words, the state is not of people and democracy is not for all.”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“Still, in 1877, Engels wanted to protect us from false socialism. Still then, in Anti-Dühring, he wrote that not any nationalization is socialist, because in the contrary case both Bismarck and Napoleon would have to be arranged among the founders of socialism.”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“Being kind to someone, only to look kind to others, defeats the purpose of being kind.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“When you see people only as personalities, rather than souls with life missions to fulfill, you forever limit the growth and possibilities of what God has in store for another person.”
― Shannon Alder

“In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Spinoza: The Letters

“When you lose your ego, you win. It really is that simple.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Goddamn Summerset. I've told him to leave my car when I park it."

"I think he did." Peabody flipped on her sunshades, pointed. "It's blocking the drive, see?"

"Oh, yeah." Eve cleared her throat. The car was just as she'd left it, and fluttering in the mild breeze were a few torn articles of clothing. "Don't ask," she muttered and started to hoof it down the drive.

"I wasn't going to." Peabody's voice was smooth as silk, "Speculation's more interesting.”
― J.D. Robb, Rapture in Death

“These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve.”
― Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True

“What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that God might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or God might punish those whose faith is prompted by prudence. Perhaps God prefers the abstinent to those who whore around with some denomination he despises. Perhaps he reserves special rewards for those who deny themselves the comfort of belief. Perhaps the intellectual ascetic will win all while those who compromised their intellectual integrity lose everything.

There are many other possibilities. There might be many gods, including one who favors people like Pascal; but the other gods might overpower or outvote him, à la Homer. Nietzsche might well have applied to Pascal his cutting remark about Kant: when he wagered on God, the great mathematician 'became an idiot.”
― Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy

“Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory.”
― Michael Crichton

“Speculation is an effort, probably unsuccessful, to turn a little money into a lot. Investment is an effort, which should be successful, to prevent a lot of money from becoming a little.”
― Fred Schwed Jr., Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street

“A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.”
― Michael Crichton

“First impression is not the last reflection of a true friend, so if you are head over heels for someone who just bought you a cake, you'd better think twice before devouring your misery.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing); or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century, The

“Here we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we'll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

“In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture.”
― Jerry A. Coyne

“[...] if truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.
[review of The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life, Nature 442, 983-984 (31 August 2006)]”
― Jerry A. Coyne

“Speculation is also the natural realm of tolerance, for judgment demands evidence, and it follows that the absence of evidence which forms the core of speculation requires the absence of judgement.”
― Daniel Abraham, The Widow's House

“You can beat a horse race, but you can't beat the races.”
― Jesse Livermore, How to Trade In Stocks

“If you leave something in the fryer too long, it will burn!”
― Niedria Kenny

“Speculation — as the etymology of the word shows — is an intuitive, an almost visionary, mode of apprehension. This does not mean, of course, that it is mere irresponsible meandering of the mind, which ignores reality or seeks to escape from its problems. Speculative thought transcends experience, but only because it attempts to explain, to unify, to order experience. It achieves this end by means of hypotheses. If we use the word in its original sense, then we may say that speculative thought attempts to underpin the chaos of experience so that it may reveal the features of a structure — order, coherence, and meaning.”
― Henri Frankfort, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man

“The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking. Thus, dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. "It bears its end within itself and unfolds it-as Hegel already noticed-by cunning. With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“The famous Mr. John Law, then a youth, afterwards confessed, that the facility with which he saw the passion of speculation communicate itself from all to all, satisfied him of the possibility of producing the same effect from the same cause, but upon a larger scale, when the Duke of Orleans, in the year of the Missisippi, engaged him, against his will, to turn his bank into a bubble.”
― John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume II

“What If is like opening Pandora's box, but instead of unleashing chaos, it unleashes your inner genius. It’s the spark that ignites your creativity, the fuel that powers your innovation, and the key that unlocks the door to your endless possibilities. So, the next time you find yourself pondering “what if,” don’t hold back. Let your imagination run wild, embrace the unknown, and dare to dream big. After all, the greatest stories begin with those two simple words: “What if…”
― Life is Positive

“It used to be said that a picture is worth a thousand words; however today, in journalism and across social media, a picture is worth a thousand out-of-context speculations.”
― Criss Jami

“Periods of speculative frenzy always draw both scoundrels and suckers to Wall Street, the way a three-alarm fire attracts onlookers and pickpockets.”
― Robert Sobel, The Big Board: A History of the New York Stock Market

“If everything came from nothing, how could anything be impossible?”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“I didn't get to be 99 years old by fool speculation," Granddaddy replied. "It's hard enough separating the good stuff from the bullshit without adding to the whole mess by wanting to know what you ain't gonna know.”
― Jim Dodge, Fup

“When facts are few, speculations are most likely to represent individual psychology.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“Some who have a keen eye for detail are the ones who spot the flaws in what is believed by the majority to be truth.”
― Dreagen Grim, Born of Fire: The Dawn of Legend