Top 100 Quotes About Speculation
#1. Speculation is carried on in safety, but, when it comes to action, fear causes failure.
Thucydides
#2. Of course, speculation will always make a crisis worse. If there is a weak point, it will expose it.
George Soros
#3. The book is worth reading, in part because it is enjoyable to read of
other people's folly, not to mention their avarice and stupidity."
Roger Lowenstein, reviewing "Devil Take the Hindmost: a History
of Financial Speculation", WSJ 6-1-99
Roger Lowenstein
#4. The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.
Roger Bacon
#5. He made a careful rehearsal of some of their bits of talk
why had she said this? what had she meant by that? why had she done the other? He dwelt on these matters with an absorbed speculation, and with a young man of Ogden's temperament speculation was but the first step on the way to love.
Henry Blake Fuller
#6. A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.
Robert A. Heinlein
#7. Dogmas are the toys that amuse and can satisfy but unreasoning children. They are the offspring of human speculation and prejudiced fancy.
H. P. Blavatsky
#8. But if it was always a point of speculation, where one person insisted it was a certain way and another denied it, how would anyone ever hold on to the truth?
Kiera Cass
#9. Still, the novelty of any letter or package was sufficient that no one suggested opening it until the full measure of enjoyment should have been extracted from speculation about its contents.
Diana Gabaldon
#10. It is no small benefit on finding oneself in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main lines of the forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by ingenious speculation.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#11. I am a firm believer, that without speculation there is no good and original observation.
Charles Darwin
#12. 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
#13. A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.
Donna Leon
#14. Truth almost always did come out in the end, but by the end, truth was often so wrapped around with rumors and speculation and absolute lies that most people never did believe it.
Robert Jordan
#15. A good business is based on information, analysis and insight, not speculation or opinion. Not all business owners share
Doug Richard
#16. An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery.
John Keats
#17. I'm pretty far out of the loop. There's always a lot of speculation and what-have-you. I'm sure it's fun for people to watch and have fantasies of who might go where. The reality is, guys will change teams.
Andrew Ference
#18. Speculation is perfectly all right, but if you stay there you've only founded a superstition. If you test it, you've started a science.
Hal Clement
#19. I agree we have enough books that attempt to explain why God allows suffering, presumably in a way that lets God off the hook. And while much smarter men than I have constructed elaborate systems in this pursuit, they are by definition exercises in speculation.
Tullian Tchividjian
#20. The amount of speculation surrounding my romantic life is astounding. It's strange how involved people get: invested and angry, really disappointed.
Sienna Miller
#21. One becomes a theologian by living, by dying, and by being damned, not by understanding, reading, and speculation.
Martin Luther
#22. The whole thing became a matter of speculation: I was soon (in the famous words) "altering 'I believe' to 'one does feel.' " And oh, the relief of it!
C.S. Lewis
#23. Gout produces calculus in the kidney ... the patient has frequently to entertain the painful speculation as to whether gout or stone be the worst disease. Sometimes the stone, on passing, kills the patient, without waiting for the gout.
Thomas Sydenham
#24. 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.
#25. ...I don't rightly know. It just ain't possible to explain some things, maybe even most things. It's interesting to wonder on them and do some speculation, but the main thing is you have to accept it - take it for what it is, and get on with your getting." (91)
Jim Dodge
#26. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#27. Each time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from their perspective, and imagined that, were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs massed in a grove.
Teju Cole
#28. If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers.
William Butler Yeats
#29. There has been no case made - based on anything other than speculation - that Iraq poses a threat.
Scott Ritter
#30. This was yet another consequence of turning Wall Street partnerships into public corporations: It turned them into objects of speculation. It was no longer the social and economic relevance of a bank that rendered it too big to fail, but the number of side bets that had been made upon it.
Michael Lewis
#31. We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact.
Carl Sagan
#32. Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#33. Another great evil arising from this desire to be thought rich; or rather, from the desire not to be thought poor, is the destructive thing which has been honored by the name of 'speculation'; but which ought to be called Gambling.
William Cobbett
#34. It doesn't follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it's ancestral. It doesn't follow you can't cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It's as natural and desirable as -- syphilis...
H.G.Wells
#35. Speculation is necessary in business, but in affairs of the heart, it often leads to poor judgement.
Sylvia Day
#36. The writers in the newspapers could sounds smart because they did not have the responsibilities of decision, and they could sound bold by enunciating positions which they were not required to implement.
Elton Trueblood
#37. You are protected. But if you don't take risks, God will retreat and become only a subject of philosophical speculation ...
Paulo Coelho
#38. If I know Hinduism at all, it is essentially inclusive and ever-growing, ever-responsive. It gives the freest scope for imagination, speculation and reason.
Mahatma Gandhi
#39. Speculation, speculation!' she [Caroline Hamelin] mechanically repeated, struggling with her doubts. 'Ah! the idea of it fills my heart with disturbing anguish.
Emile Zola
#40. One problem with the focus on speculation is that it tends to promote the growth of the great intellectual cancer of our times: conspiracy theories.
Gary Weiss
#41. It's easy to get lost in endless speculation. So today, release the need to know why things happen as they do. Instead, ask for the insight to recognize what you're meant to learn.
Caroline Myss
#42. Our are speculations are not the measure of our God.
J.I. Packer
#43. We can be only too grateful that an Archbishop of Braga should have immersed himself so deeply in theological speculation, armed and equipped as he was for war, with his coat of mail, his broadsword dangling from the
Jose Saramago
#44. A reporter started off: "I know a lot of this is kind of speculation." Popovich interupting: "You're going to ask me anyway." Reporter: "And you're going to shoot it down." Popovich replied: "Next question."
Gregg Popovich
#45. I do believe that we should substantially lower student debt in this country, which is crushing millions of people. We pay for it, in my view, by a tax on Wall Street speculation. The middle class bailed out Wall Street in their time of need. Now, it is Wall Street's time to help the middle class.
Bernie Sanders
#46. 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
#47. From a strictly economic point of view, buying gold in a major inflation and holding it probably presents the least risk of capital loss of any investment or speculation.
Henry Hazlitt
#48. Too many composers become involved in intellectual speculation which seems to matter more to them than the sound that comes out of all this speculation.
Louise Talma
#49. I write more for the children of the computer revolution, who are also interested in speculation and exploring the human condition, but approach it from an information perspective.
Charles Stross
#50. One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
George Santayana
#51. The end of knowledge is power ... the scope of all speculation is the performing of some action or thing to be done.
Thomas Hobbes
#52. My speculation is that the U.S. does not want to establish the principle that it has to defer to some higher authority before carrying out the use of violence.
Noam Chomsky
#53. Scientists do what writers do. They also live with an active interiority, only the ongoing speculation in their heads is about relations in the physical world rather than the psychological one.
Vivian Gornick
#54. Nothing is as evanescent in history as the pansophic theories that flourish among the illuminati of all times under the bright sunlight of the latest scientific discoveries; and nothing can be more easily dismissed by later periods as mere speculation.
H. Richard Niebuhr
#55. They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation.
Jenny Offill
#56. Wise man was he who counselled that speculation should have free course, and look fearlessly towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever and howsoever it listed.
Thomas Carlyle
#58. If the two women feared that the coming of this date [their retirement] might give some clue to their ages, it was not an occasion for embarrassment because nobody else had been in the least interested, both of them having long ago reached ages beyond any kind of speculation.
Barbara Pym
#59. But know this. All is speculation under the sky. All myth, all religion, all philosophy, all history - is lies.
Anne Rice
#60. What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.
Samuel Butler
#61. Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#62. Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You're free to reinvent yourself at will.
Margaret Atwood
#64. The first and most important reason for its elimination is the unquestioned fact that evolution is not a science; it is a hypothesis only, a speculation.
William Bell Riley
#65. 'Interstellar' may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular.
Richard Corliss
#66. Philosophy is based on speculation, on logic, on thought, on the synthesis of what we know and on the analysis of what we do not know. Philosophy must include within its confines the whole content of science, religion and art.
P.D. Ouspensky
#67. Such thinking is sheer speculation, but the laws of physics allow for the possibility of opening a hole in space by concentrating enough energy at a single point, until we access the space-time foam and wormholes emerge connecting our universe to a baby universe.
Michio Kaku
#68. Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
#69. I think there's a lot of crazy stuff on the Internet. You read stuff that is wild speculation, and there's an element of it that makes me not trust it because there's this undercurrent of insanity to it sometimes.
Neill Blomkamp
#70. Increasing values again brought increasing values. As with the canals and turnpikes, it was transportation, this time the railroads, that was the focus of the speculation. Here the horizons seemed truly without limit. Who could lose on what was so obviously needed?
John Kenneth Galbraith
#72. No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#73. After months of speculation, the sitcom star Ellen DeGeneres admitted that yes, she's gay. Inspired by her courage, today, diet-guru Richard Simmons admitted that he is really, really, really, really gay.
Norm MacDonald
#74. How we love to blame others for our misfortunes! Almost every individual who has lost money in stock speculation has on the tip of his tongue an explanation which he trots out to show that it wasn't his own fault at all ... Hardly one loser has the manliness to say frankly, I was wrong.
B.C. Forbes
#75. In a sense, photographs are highly literary, and the photographer, like the writer, has to be both a master of craft and a visionary. Patient accumulation of facts and then speculation about their meaning is the nature of authorship in both mediums.
Peter C Bunnell
#76. Speculation is a parasite feeding upon values, creating none.
Andrew Carnegie
#77. They have seized upon the government by bribery and corruption. They have made speculation and public robbery a science. They have loaded the nation, the state, the county, and the city with debt.
Denis Kearney
#78. Wishful speculation is a spirit's gluttony
Aaron Ozee
#79. You cannot exist as a $20 billion company with speculation.
Eike Batista
#80. The imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good.
Pope Francis
#81. In spite of the haze of speculation, it is still something of a shock to find myself here, coming to terms with an enormous trust placed in my hands and with the inevitable sense of inadequacy that goes with that.
Rowan Williams
#82. There is no shadow of protection to be had by sheltering behind the slender stockades of visionary speculation, or by hiding behind the wagon-wheels of pacific theories.
Soong May-ling
#84. We must observe that the knowledge of God which we are invited to cultivate is not that which, resting satisfied with empty speculation, only flutters in the brain, but a knowledge which will prove substantial and fruitful whenever it is duly perceived and rooted in the heart.
John Calvin
#85. The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
Walter Lippmann
#87. In this way, more information and more openness can, perversely, feed more mistrust and more wild speculation: The more we know, the more we realize just how in the dark we truly are.
Christopher L. Hayes
#88. The one thing that's absolutely clear is that Karl was not the source for the leak and there's no basis for any additional speculation.
Robert Luskin
#89. I'm aware that, whatever the circumstances, there will always be speculation about me.
Cristiano Ronaldo
#90. I know there's a great deal of speculation, and while I appreciate the interest, kind of, my contract ends in May and I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do. I'm fortunate to have a couple of opportunities to think long and hard about.
Katie Couric
#91. So far from realizing philosophy, the spectacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation.
Guy Debord
#92. Workers are on the streets today with a clear message to Europe's leaders. There is a great danger that workers are going to pay the price for the reckless speculation that took place in financial markets.
John Monks
#93. He was carried over the difficult places in spite of himself; and he went plunging away in mad career - a very Mazeppa-ride upon the wild horse Speculation.
Upton Sinclair
#94. I don't think that governments should permit speculation in raw materials, because they're what the economy basically needs.
Michael Hudson
#95. Dept. of Speculation is gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art. Jenny Offill is a master of form and feeling, and she gets life on the page in new, startling ways.
Sam Lipsyte
#96. The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.
Thomas Piketty
#97. Speculation is a dangerous thing without any evidence to back it up.
Jane Casey
#98. So few humans seem to fully exist themselves that I wonder if all this endless speculation and haggling about God is really an exploration of a more interesting and embarrassing question about ourselves.
Michael Leunig
#99. This is pure speculation, but for a period of time, a lot of getting into a party was through fundraising and volunteer work, and Republican women had more time to do that than democratic women, who were out there getting jobs.
Madeleine Albright
#100. He didn't say anything more, just waited for me to tell him what I'd been thinking. It was pure speculation, and I was opening myself up to ridicule by saying anything at all. I sat on the stool and realized that I had my loyalties, too.
Patricia Briggs
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