I'm Not Predictable Quotes

“In my experience, boys are predictable. As soon as they think of something, they do it. Girls are smarter-they plan ahead. They think about not getting caught.”

— Eoin Colfer

“If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.”

— June Jordan

“Getting what you want means making the decisions you need to make to get what you want.
Not the decisions those around you think you should make.
Making the safe decision is full, predictable and elads nowhere new.
The unsafe decision causess you to think and respond in a way you hadn't thought of.
And that thought will lead to other thoughts which will help you achieve what you want.
Start taking bad decisions and it will take you to a plce where others only dream of being.”

— Paul Arden

“Understand: people judge you by appearances, the image you project through your
actions, words, and style. If you do not take control of this process, then people will see
and define you the way they want to, often to your detriment. You might think that
being consistent with this image will make others respect and trust you, but in fact it is
the opposite-over time you seem predictable and weak. Consistency is an illusion
anyway-each passing day brings changes within you. You must not be afraid to
express these evolutions. The powerful learn early in life that they have the freedom to
mold their image, fitting the needs and moods of the moment. In this way, they keep
others off balance and maintain an air of mystery. You must follow this path and find
great pleasure in reinventing yourself, as if you were the author writing your own
drama”

— 50 Cent

“A disruption of the circadian cycle-the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday life-seems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression; this is why brutal insomnia so often occurs and is most likely why each day's pattern of distress exhibits fairly predictable alternating periods of intensity and relief.”

— William Styron

“The scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity-that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product-predictable if not indispensable-of the evolution of the universe.”

— Jacques Monod

“The incommensurability between the modern economic system and the people who staff it explains why modern workers have so often been depicted as 'cogs' in the larger 'machinery' of industrial civilization; for while the practical rationalization of enterprise does require workers to be consistent, predictable, precise, uniform, and even to a certain extent creative, it does not really require them to be persons, that is, to live examined lives, to grow, to develop character, to search for truth, to know themselves, etc.”

— Craig M. Gay

“When what we believe we've mastered is no longer predictable we're not fine. The world suddenly is a very scary place. It loses its charm.”

— Patricia Cornwell

“Over time I tried everything from "the good girl" with my "perform-perfect-please" routine, to clove-smoking poet, angry activist, corporate climber, and out-of-control party girl. At first glance these may seem like reasonable, if not predictable, developmental stages, but they were more than that for me. All of my stages were different suits of armor that kept me from becoming too engaged and too vulnerable. Each strategy was built on the same premise: Keep everyone at a safe distance and always have an exit strategy.”

— Brené Brown

“Like every other area of life, we have come to believe that growth in Christ - as individuals or as churches - can and should be programmed to generate predictable outcomes that are unrealistic and are not even justified biblically. We want big results - sooner rather than later.”

— Michael S. Horton

“They [progressives] are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all people and societies strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.”

— William F. Buckley, Jr.

“The pot-thrower in the hut behind the shop, hands and forearms slick with clay, dreaming, yes, of the years in which a life took shape, when each press of a fingertip sent a deep track across a once smooth surface, changing the future, reshaping the past, and was this not as much chance as design? For all that intent could score a path, that the ripples sent up and down and outward could be surmised by decades of experience, was the outcome ever truly predictable?”

— Steven Erikson

“Hooks need to be predictable and not predictable at the same time.”

— Ken Hill

“There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character
shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the
bank; Miss Maudie Atkinson's shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it's nothing unusual-her mother did the same.”

— Harper Lee

“If there's a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn't exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn't have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that's it. That's all an artist does.”

— Tom Robbins

“Art is not predictable. Art is not golf, as great as that may be. There are 360 degrees of choice to make.”

— Tina Weymouth

“This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued janjaweed terror. Funding for the troops is about to run out, and it seems that no one, including the United States, is ready to put forth more money or come up with new ideas to stop the killing and displacement. This is not surprising to those of us who lived through twenty years of oppression by the hands of Khartoum and its militias.”

— Dave Eggers

“The reactions of the human heart are not mechanical and predictable but infinitely subtle and delicate.”

— Daisaku Ikeda

“You learn that not all things fall into a certain kind of pattern that can be predictable and that can be understandable and that's going to be easy, you know.”

— Joe Mantegna

“I like shows that are surprising and not predictable. That have deep, rich characters that are fully formed.”

— David Nevins

“After my mother died, I had a feeling that was not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.”

— Anna Quindlen

“I'm not a predictable black liberal.”

— Juan Williams

“There's a reason people are not going to Obamacare. They find out what it's gonna cost 'em, and they go somewhere else. And in the process, they're undermining the very foundation of Obamacare, all of which was predictable.”

— Rush Limbaugh

“There are companies trying to build business within Saudi Arabia, and what they find is that if they try to bring on locals and teach them how to become senior executives, they just don't show up to work. They are not predictable as to when they'll come in and how much of their hearts are into that opportunity.”

— Clayton Christensen

“The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.”

— Martin Rees

“Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.”

— Gail Sheehy

“You do scenes with certain people, all the time, and you know them so well. It's not that it can become predictable, but it's the same thing. So, when you have new people in the mix, it's so refreshing.”

— Crystal Reed

“Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were collateral cousins, perhaps already living in Europe while we emerged in Africa ... In other words, we are an improbable and fragile entity, fortunately successful after precarious beginnings as a small population in Africa, not the predictable end result of a global tendency. We are a thing, an item of history, not an embodiment of general principles.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

“Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

“Art is not just ornamental, an enhancement of life. It is a path in itself, a way out of the predictable and conventional ... a map to self discovery.”

— Gabrielle Roth

“To live in a fully predictable world is not to be a man.”

— C.S. Lewis

“In 302, the Roman emperor Diocletian commanded "there should be cheapness," declaring, "Unprincipled greed appears wherever our armies ... march ... Our law shall fix a measure and a limit to this greed." The predictable result of Diocletian's food price controls were black markets, hunger and food confiscation by his soldiers. Despite the disastrous history of price controls, politicians never manage to resist tampering with prices
that's not a flattering observation of their learning abilities.”

— Walter E. Williams

“I do not like debt and do not like to invest in companies that have too much debt, particularly long-term debt. With long-term debt, increases in interest rates can drastically affect company profits and make future cash flows less predictable.”

— Warren Buffett

“The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.”

— Warren Buffett

“While most managers spend their time attempting to predict the future accurately - and while that's valuable - the best managers are able to generate a future which was not going to happen otherwise - that is, a future which was not predictable.”

— Werner Erhard

“The metaphysical doctrine of determinism simply asserts that all events in this world are fixed, or unalterable, or predetermined. It does not assert that they are known to anybody, or predictable by scientific means. But it asserts that the future is as little changeable as is the past. Everybody knows what we mean when we say that the past cannot be changed. It is in precisely the same sense that the future cannot be changed, according to metaphysical determinism.”

— Karl Popper