Speculation Quotes

1. "Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire."
Author: Alice Munro

2. "Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."
Author: Barbara Tuchman

3. "I have never indulged our society's misguided notion that my personal life is relevant to my work, so any reporting surrounding that is necessarily hearsay, speculation or fantasy."
Author: Billy Crudup

4. "Science has marched forward. But civilization's values remain rooted in philosophies, religious traditions, and ethical frameworks devised many centuries ago. Even our economic system, capitalism, is half a millennium old. The first stock exchange opened in 1602 in Amsterdam. By 1637, tulip mania had caused the first speculation bubble and crash. And not a lot has changed. Virtually every business stills uses the double-entry bookkeeping and accounting adopted in thirteenth –century Venice. So our daily dealings are still heavily influenced by ideas that were firmly set before anyone knew the world was round. In many ways, they reflect how we understood the world when we didn't understand the world at all."
Author: Carl Safina

5. "Of course, this kind of speculation was a waste of mental energy, and he knew it. All they could do at that point was watch and wait."
Author: Christa Faust

6. "FAUSTUS. Had I as many souls as there be stars, I'd give them all for Mephistophilis. By him I'll be great emperor of the world, And make a bridge thorough the moving air, To pass the ocean with a band of men; I'll join the hills that bind the Afric shore, And make that country continent to Spain, And both contributory to my crown: The Emperor shall not live but by my leave, Nor any potentate of Germany. Now that I have obtain'd what I desir'd, I'll live in speculation of this art, Till Mephistophilis return again."
Author: Christopher Marlowe

7. "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."
Author: Denis Kearney

8. "Invisible prose only!" rules out the sparkling style of [writers]. . . For [whom] vivid prose, and the visionary mind it evinces, rich with speculation, insight, and subjectivity, is the craft and offers a unique caliber of truth. Is there any other art form one would praise by saying it's "invisible"? By definition, art transcends the ordinary, calls attention to itself, and offers virtuosity as its calling card. One that makes it possible to do what metaphor does so well: illuminate what can't be wholly understood."
Author: Diane Ackerman

9. "There are surely other worlds than this - other thoughts than the thoughts of the multitude - other speculations than the speculations of the sophist. Who then shall call thy conduct into question? who blame thee for thy visionary hours, or denounce those occupations as a wasting away of life, which were but the overflowings of thine everlasting energies?"
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

10. "The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing th orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist's work."
Author: Edward W. Said

11. "You cannot exist as a $20 billion company with speculation."
Author: Eike Batista

12. "For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob."
Author: Franklin D. Roosevelt

13. "We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred."
Author: Franklin D. Roosevelt

14. "The claim that hung over him haunted his very life, turning the currents of his thought into channels of speculation unknown before. One day when these questions were fighting in his heart, all at once it seemed as if a soundless voice in the depth of his soul replied, "Thy soul, however it became known to itself, is from the pure heart of God." And with the thought, the horizon of his life began to clear."
Author: George MacDonald

15. "People have contemplated the origin and evolution of the universe since before the time of Aristotle. Very recently, the era of speculation has given way to a time of science."
Author: George Smoot

16. "An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form."
Author: H.P. Lovecraft

17. "Ushikawa always saw himself as a realist, and he actually was. Metaphysical speculation wasn't his thing. If something really existed you, had to except it as a reality whether or not it made sense or was logical. That was his basic way of thinking. Principles Logic didn't give birth to a reality. Reality came first and the principles of logic followed. So, he decided, he would have to begin by accepting this reality: that there were two moons in the sky."
Author: Haruki Murakami

18. "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."
Author: Henry Blake Fuller

19. "Speculation into thing already produced that is not business"
Author: Henry Ford

20. "In periods when shallow speculation is rife, one might think that metaphysics would shine forth, at least, by the brilliance of its modest reserve. But the very age that is unaware of the majesty of metaphysics, likewise overlooks its poverty. Its majesty? It is wisdom. Its poverty? It is human science."
Author: Jacques Maritain

21. "Not that the heart can be good without knowledge, for without knowledge the heart is empty. But there are two kinds of knowledge: the first is alone in its bare speculation of things, and the second is accompanied by the grace of faith and love, which causes a man to do the will of God from the heart."The"
Author: John Bunyan

22. "One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind's imagining into another"
Author: John Keats

23. "Literature, in fact, had been concerned with virtues and vices of a perfectly healthy sort, the regular functioning of brains of a normal conformation, the practical reality of current ideas, with never a thought for morbid depravities and other-worldly aspirations; in short, the discoveries of these anaylists of human nature stopped short at the speculations good or bad, classified by the church; their efforts amounted to no more than the humdrum researches of a botanist who watches closely the expected development of ordinary flora planted in common or garden soil."
Author: Joris Karl Huysmans

24. "There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken."
Author: Juan Gabriel Vásquez

25. "The ideas of justice of Europe and Africa are not the same and those of the one world are unbearable to the other. To the African there is but one way of counter-balancing the catastrophes of existence, it shall be done by replacement; he does not look for the motive of an action. Whether you lie in wait for your enemy and cut his throat in the dark; or you fell a tree, and a thoughtless stranger passes by and is killed; so far as punishment goes, to the Native mind, it is the same thing. A loss has been brought upon the community and must be made up for, somewhere, by somebody. The Native will not give time or thought to the weighing of guilt or desert; either he fears that this may lead him too far, or he reasons that such things are no concerns of his. But he will devote himself, in endless speculations, to the method by which crime or disaster shall be weighed up in sheep and goats - time does not count to him; he leads you solemnly into a sacred maze of sophistry."
Author: Karen Blixen

26. "I struggle with deciding when to answer or ignore the constant speculation about my private life, because I feel like that doesn't belong to anybody but me."
Author: Lauren London

27. "Men recorded their experiences and called it history; men looked about the world and called their observations science; men wondered about the existence of God and the problem of evil and called their speculations theology; men did handiwork and called it art; men made up stories, wrote them down and called them literature; men thought about such topics as truth, beauty, justice, and the nature of existence and called their opinions philosophy."
Author: Linda Tschirhart Sanford

28. "The Times carried detailed descriptions of Sara's ivory gown and the five-carat blue diamond on her finger, the Cravens' reported opinions of the play, and speculation on whether Derek was truly a "reformed rake." "There's not a word of truth in any of it," Derek said. "Except the part where they said you were resplendent." "Thank you, kind sir." Sara set down the paper and reached over to toy with one of the large soapy feet propped on the porcelain rim of the tub. She wriggled his big toe playfully. "What about the part that says you're reformed?" "I'm not. I still do everything I used to do…except now only with you." "And quite impressively," she replied, her tone demure."
Author: Lisa Kleypas

29. "You don't think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour, and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation."
Author: M.L. Stedman

30. "He smirks, popping his sizeable package out of the boxer briefs that are tight enough for speculation and loose enough for mystery."
Author: Marata Eros

31. "You're trying too hard to find a correlation here. You don't know these people, you don't know what they intended. You try to compile statistics and correlate them to a result that amounts to nothing more than speculation."
Author: Marc Racicot

32. "Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You're free to reinvent yourself at will."
Author: Margaret Atwood

33. "Android speculation," Kai said, pointing at Nainsi. "It's better than regular speculation."
Author: Marissa Meyer

34. "In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes."
Author: Michael J. Behe

35. "Part of my attraction to ancient art is that there is an element of risk, of speculation."
Author: Michael Steinhardt

36. "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."
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

37. "Aeschines knew that if he had any hopes of humbling his charismatic rival, he had to reinforce his views with facts, not heated speculation. Addressing a legal assembly of citizens known as graphe paranomon, he built his attack around this tart observation: "A fine thing, my fellow Athenians, a fine thing is the preservation of public records. Records do not change, and they do not shift sides with traitors, but they grant to you, the people, the opportunity to know, whenever you want, which men, once bad, through some transformation now claim to be good"."
Author: Nicholas A. Basbanes

38. "Utopian speculations ... must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope."
Author: Norman O. Brown

39. "Yet, as has been said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal."
Author: Oscar Wilde

40. "But perhaps what mattered at eighty was habit, the body no longer interested in sex, the mind no longer interested in speculation, the smaller things in life mattering more than the large and, in the end, the slow realization that nothing really mattered at all."
Author: P.D. James

41. "After we ate we was silent on our blankets looking out across the mighty Great Divide I never seen this country before it were like a fairy story landscape the clear and windy skies was filled with diamonds the jagged black outlines of the ranges were a panorama.You're going to ride a horse across all that.I know.He laughed and he were right I knew nothing of what lay ahead.See that there he pointed. That is called the Crosscut Saw and that one is Mount Speculation and yonder is Mount Buggery and that other is Mount Despair did you know that?No Harry.You will and you'll be sorry."
Author: Peter Carey

42. "… in these new days and in these new pages a philosophical tradition of the spontaneity of speculation kind has been rekindled on the sacred isle of Éire, regardless of its creative custodian never having been taught how to freely speculate, how to profoundly question, and how to playfully define. Spontaneity of speculation being synonymous with the philosophical-poetic, the philosophical-poetic with the rural philosopher-poet, and by roundelay the rural philosopher-poet thee with the spontaneity of speculation be. And by the way of the rural what may we say? A philosopher-poet of illimitable space we say. Iohannes Scottus Ériugena the metaphor of old salutes you; salutes your lyrical ear and your skilful strumming of the rippling harp. (Source: Hearing in the Write, Canto 19, Ivy-muffled)"
Author: Richard McSweeney

43. "I nodded, mollified. "Okay, I can roll with that. And then after that, I suppose it's just a matter of time until we're taking the kids to soccer practice." Her eyebrows rose. "Kids?" "Relax, it's years away. But can you imagine? Your brains, my charm, our collective good looks . . . then add in the usual physical abilities dhampirs get." She looked more amused than appalled at the speculation, which was something I'd never thought I'd see. "It's really not even fair to everyone else. Good thing you're on birth control, since the world obviously isn't ready for our perfect offspring." "Obviously," she laughed."
Author: Richelle Mead

44. "In an age of stagnant or declining birthrates, too, these communities' willingness to heed the admonition to be fruitful and multiply has led to speculation about what the demographer Philip Longman calls "the survival of the godliest."
Author: Ross Douthat

45. "The amount of speculation surrounding my romantic life is astounding. It's strange how involved people get: invested and angry, really disappointed."
Author: Sienna Miller

46. "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."
Author: Teju Cole

47. "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."
Author: Thomas Henry Huxley

48. "The propounders of what are called the "ethics of evolution," when the 'evolution of ethics' would usually better express the object of their speculations, adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments, in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution. I have little doubt, for my own part, that they are on the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, there is, so far, as much natural sanction for the one as the other. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before."
Author: Thomas Henry Huxley

49. "Here we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we'll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption."
Author: Vernor Vinge

50. "Abstruse speculations contain vertigo."
Author: Victor Hugo

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