Speculative Quotes

#1. A striking feature of financial service activities during the past few decades is that the financial transactions essential to the operation of the 'real' economy has become increasingly dwarfed by speculative activity.

Peter Dicken

#2. Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union.

George Eliot

#3. F or a decade after the bursting of the debt bubble in 1837, business conditions were depressed in the United States. The number of banks available for financing speculative adventures declined. Then, after another 10 years, public memory faded again.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#4. The history of science is everywhere speculative. It is a marvelous hiatory. It makes you proud to be a human being.

Karl Popper

#5. My last book was speculative. I just don't quite know what I am doing. But I'll get there. I have a list of things I would love to write.

Jami Attenberg

#6. If you write thrillers or mysteries or horror fiction or quote-unquote speculative fiction, men might read you, and the 'Times' might notice you.

Jennifer Weiner

#7. I represented Wall Street, as a senator from New York, and I went to Wall Street in December of 2007 - before the big crash that we had - I basically said, 'Cut it out! Quit foreclosing on homes! Quit engaging in these kinds of speculative behaviors.'

Hillary Clinton

#8. The iPod is not a new category. Music is not new. It's not a speculative market. It's a very, very large market. It's been around for thousands of years and will be around as long as humans exist.

Steve Jobs

#9. The story, like all the best stories, split like an amoeba, forming an endless series of new stories and opinion pieces and speculative articles, each spawning its own counter chorus.

Robert Galbraith

#10. At long as a stock is acting right, and the market is right, do not be in a hurry to take profits. One should never permit speculative ventures to run into investments.

Jesse Lauriston Livermore

#11. The more clearly the immensely speculative nature of geological science is recognized, the easier it becomes to remodel our concepts of any inferred terrestrial conditions and processes in order to make outrages upon them not outrageous.

William Morris Davis

#12. An early fascination with higher mathematics at the university level blossomed into speculative thinking that could provide a basis for dealing with economic issues.

Lawrence R. Klein

#13. War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as 'The Battle of Dorking' from 1871 showed how SF's trademark 'what if' scenarios could easily encompass warfare.

Paul Di Filippo

#14. A speculative despair is unpardonable where it our duty to act.

Edmund Burke

#15. By millions of years, time winged onward through eternity, to the end - the end, of which, in the old-earth days, I had thought remotely, and in hazily speculative fashion. And now, it was approaching in a manner of which none had ever dreamed.

William Hope Hodgson

#16. I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.

Immanuel Kant

#17. All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

Immanuel Kant

#18. Yea, the least glimpse of the glory of God in the face of Christ doth more exalt and ennoble the soul, than all the knowledge of those that have the greatest speculative understanding in divinity, without grace.

Jonathan Edwards

#19. Science usually operates in sort of three modes, things that are well established, we know what we're talking about, more highly confident. There are competing explanations, we have a pretty good idea, but we're not sure. And then things are speculative.

Stephen Schneider

#20. As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

William Gibson

#21. I shall endeavour still further to prosecute this inquiry, an inquiry I trust not merely speculative, but of sufficient moment to inspire the pleasing hope of its becoming essentially beneficial to mankind.

Edward Jenner

#22. Science is knowledge certain and evident in itself, or by the principles from which it is deducted, or with which it is certainly connected. It is subjective, as existing in the mind; objective, as embodied in truths; speculative, as leading to do something, as in practical science.

William Fleming

#23. I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.

Fred Saberhagen

#24. Speculative joy, the joy derived from being right and being rewarded, may well be similar to the rush felt by a winning gambler.

Michael Steinhardt

#25. It's also interesting to notice that most of the best Finnish speculative writers are women.

Toni Jerrman

#26. The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks - ways of thinking analytically - are tied to nature's laws.

Edward Tufte

#27. Speculative fiction includes all stories that take place in a setting contrary to known reality.

Orson Scott Card

#28. A new and speculative idea, which although it may seem trivial and almost laughable, is nonetheless of great value in quickening the spirit of invention.

Michael J. Gelb

#29. We are convinced that the public generally will derive far better results from fixed-value investments, if selected with exceeding care, than from speculative operations, even though these may be aided by considerable education in financial matters.

Benjamin Graham

#30. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

Walter Pater

#31. The true secret of success in the investment and speculative world is not so much which good securities to buy, but rather which investments to avoid.

Morton Shulman

#32. I make films but I am trained as a designer. I come from this series of designers called critical designers, speculative designers.

Nelly Ben Hayoun

#33. A maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is merely speculative; a "principle" carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#34. Poetic and speculative photographs can result if one works carefully and accurately, yet letting chance relationships have full play.

Frederick Sommer

#35. I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.

Jonathan Coe

#36. Never mingle your speculative and investment operations in the same account nor in any part of your thinking.

Benjamin Graham

#37. In the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative the conclusion we draw therefrom ... .

Michael Lewis

#38. Fusion power is speculative and experimental. I think it is reckless to assume that the fusion problem will be cracked, but I'm happy to estimate how much power fusion could deliver, if the problems are cracked.

David J. C. MacKay

#39. Seek first the Kingdom of God: that is, the first order of business is to transform one's own inner life, not the accumulation of external trappings of speculative knowledge.

John D. Caputo

#40. Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.

Sidney Hook

#41. No man can be a compleat Lawyer by universalitie of knowledge without experience in particular cases, nor by bare experience without universalitie of knowledge; he must be both speculative & active, for the science of the laws, I assure you, must joyne hands with experience.

Edward Coke

#42. Thus the same object may supply a practical perception to one person and a speculative one to another, or the same person may perceive it partly practically and partly speculatively.

Samuel Alexander

#43. Historians don't really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low.

Aldrich Ames

#44. My studies in Speculative philosophy, metaphysics, and science are all summed up in the image of a mouse called man running in and out of every hole in the Cosmos hunting for the Absolute Cheese.

Benjamin De Casseres

#45. I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we're drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.

Billy Collins

#46. I believe in poetic discourse, in the value of speech in a non-naturalistic way; it's speculative.

Howard Barker

#47. With uncertainty in oil markets, a buildup of speculative pressures and the large U.S. current account deficit, there is a real possibility that Paulson's crisis-management skills will be tested.

Lawrence Summers

#48. Scientific research is compounded of ... empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning.

James Bryant Conant

#49. The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.

Ronald Coase

#50. I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.

Nnedi Okorafor

#51. The risks are far greater to your child of not getting immunized than any kind of speculative potential relationship between the vaccine and the development of autism.

Irwin Redlener

#52. We have little choice but to place a certain level of trust in scientists - even when it comes to the model-driven speculative discipline of climate change. And, need it be said, most scientists take great care in being honest, principled and precise.

David Harsanyi

#53. It's Halloween, you can tell everyone you're going as your favorite Steampunck character."
"I don't even know what that is!"
"Because your generation has no taste in speculative science fiction.

Girl Vs Monster

#54. Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market.

Ron Chernow

#55. The Indian languages are extremely barbarous and barren, and very ill fitted for communicating things moral and divine, or even things speculative and abstract.

Jonathan Edwards

#56. I think teens are drawn to these speculative books that portray what might happen and what could happen.

Lois Lowry

#57. Faith is not a blind thing; for faith begins with knowledge. It is not a speculative thing; for faith believes facts of which it is sure. It is not an unpractical, dreamy thing; for faith trusts, and stakes its destiny upon the truth of revelation.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#58. It is worth pointing out that assuredly not more than one person out of a hundred who stayed in the market after after 1925 emerged from it with a net profit and that the speculative losses taken were appalling.

Benjamin Graham

#59. In practical matters the end is not mere speculative knowledge of what is to be done, but rather the doing of it. It is not enough to know about Virtue, then, but we must endeavor to possess it, and to use it, or to take any other steps that may make.

Aristotle.

#60. Speculative stock movements are carried too far in both directions, frequently in the general market and at all times in at least some of the individual issues.

Benjamin Graham

#61. Every practical science is concerned with human operations; as moral science is concerned with human acts, and architecture with buildings. But sacred doctrine is chiefly concerned with God, whose handiwork is especially man. Therefore it is not a practical but a speculative science.

Thomas Aquinas

#62. Where do we stand today compared to Greece circa 400 B.C.? Today's experiment-driven 'standard model' is not all that dissimilar to Democritus's speculative [sic] atomic theory.

Leon M. Lederman

#63. We shall do well ever to remember, that Christianity is not a mere speculative theory, that is to inform the mind; but a great practical lesson, to renew the heart, and to bring us back to the state from whence we are fallen.

Charles Simeon

#64. Books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight.

Richard De Bury

#65. I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.

Rafael Moneo

#66. Let us be dreamers, thinkers, speculative philosophers, or as our spouses would have it: Idiots

Douglas Adams

#67. The whole interest of my reason, whether speculative or practical, is concentrated in the three following questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? (Critique of Pure Reason

Immanuel Kant

#68. The time approaches
That will with due decision make us know
What we shall say we have and what we owe.
Thoughts speculative their unsure hopes relate,
But certain issue strokes must arbitrate;
Towards which, advance the war.
They exit marching.

William Shakespeare

#69. Love is no ingredient in a merely speculative faith, but it is the life and soul of a practical faith.

Jonathan Edwards

#70. Regardless of religion (or lack thereof), lovers of speculative fiction will swallow up these provocative stories. - Erin O'Riordan,

Tim Lieder

#71. There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.

Charles J. Shields

#72. I enjoyed Old Man's War immensely. A space war story with fast action, vivid characters, moral complexity and cool speculative physics, set in a future you almost want to live into, and a universe you sincerely hope you don't live in already.

Ken MacLeod

#73. Buffett also teaches investors that there is one important caveat to the multiyear test: Underperformance in the late stages of a speculative bull market is highly likely. It's a caveat that he repeats to this day. We

Jeremy Miller

#74. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country.

Edmund Burke

#75. In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.

Italo Calvino

#76. Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. And

Douglas Adams

#77. They went into the desert not to study speculative truth, but to wrestle with practical evil; not to perfect their analytical intelligence, but to purify their hearts.

Thomas Merton

#78. We have failed to protect science against speculative extensions of nature, continuing to assign physical and mathematical properties to hypothetical entities beyond what is observable in nature.

Robert Lanza

#79. We invest in undervalued companies that exhibit strong fundamentals, above-market dividend yields and historic earnings growth, which our analysis indicates will persist. Our strategy is to own strong, fundamentally sound companies and to avoid speculative stocks or potential bankruptcies.

David Dreman

#80. Speculative fiction is where my heart lies. It's what I read growing up, and it's what I read as an adult.

Patrick Rothfuss

#81. I don't want what I am saying to sound like a prophecy or anything like an analysis of modern society ... these are only feelings I have, and I am the least speculative man on earth.

Michelangelo Antonioni

#82. Nigerians are everywhere. There's an old joke, particularly about the Ibos, that when you finally land on Mars, you're going to find a Nigerian there who has a shop that is selling Coca-Cola
who took a speculative trip 20 years ago and has been waiting for everyone else to arrive.

Chris Abani

#83. My fundamental axiom of speculative philosophy is that materialism and spiritualism are opposite poles of the same absurdity-the absurdity of imagining that we know anything about either spirit or matter.

Thomas Huxley

#84. The period of financial distress is a gradual decline after the peak of a speculative bubble that precedes the final and massive panic and crash, driven by the insiders having exited but the sucker outsiders hanging on hoping for a revivial, but finally giving up in the final collapse.

Charles P. Kindleberger

#85. Speculative fiction both requires and rewards an open mind.

Steven Poore

#86. Attempts to estimate the impacts of climate change continue to be highly speculative.

William Nordhaus

#87. Funny, they made this new genre called Speculative Fiction, I thought all fiction had always been speculative.

Teri Louise Kelly

#88. Surely not without reason, when pirates, highwaymen, and other varieties of the extensive genus Marauder, are the only beau ideal of the active, as splenetic and railing misanthropy is of the speculative energy.

Thomas Love Peacock

#89. In reality, no one knows what the market will do; trying to predict it is a waste of time, and investing based upon that prediction is a speculative undertaking.

Seth Klarman

#90. The speculative thinker makes Christianity into theology, instead of recognizing that a living relationship to Christ involves passion, struggle, decision, personal appropriation, and inner transformation.' (Moore's summary of Kierkegaard)

Charles E. Moore

#91. Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them.

Orson Scott Card

#92. I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

Moses Mendelssohn

#93. I'll tell you an explanation that I find commonly overrated and speculative in the extreme: the idea that things that succeed in popular culture do that because they hit the temper of the times.

Cass Sunstein

#94. Concentrating wealth in the hands of the few and deregulating financial institutions and practices lead to speculative bubbles that eventually burst - and that brings the whole country down.

Jennifer Granholm

#95. It is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence.

Alfred North Whitehead

#96. Two questions form the foundation of all novels: "What if?" and "What next?" (A third question, "What now?", is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it's more a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.

Tom Clancy

#97. I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.

Rick Yancey

#98. There is a speculative battle innate to imagination this much we know, yet let us not 'bear the wounds'2 of battles' avoided. Petrified imaginaries are the scars of our aversion; calcified thought coagulated into magical formulas of destructive equivalence.

Anonymous

#99. True science is never speculative; it employs hypotheses as suggesting points for inquiry, but it never adopts the hypotheses as though they were demonstrated propositions.

Cleveland Abbe

#100. Some of the History Channel's documentaries involve docudrama segments and are highly speculative - but there seems, on the part of the producers, to be a real determination to get at the history behind our past - not the sex, which is left to drama shows and entertainment channels.

Nigel Hamilton