Predictions usually deal with events--who will win an election, whether or not a country will go to war, the specification of a ne...w invention; they center on decisions. Yet such predictions, while possible, cannot be formalized, i.e. made subject to rules. The prediction of events is inherently difficult. Events are the intersect of social vectors (interests, forces, pressures, and the like). While one can to some extent assess the strength of these vectors individually, one would need a "social physics" to predict the exact crosspoints where decisions and forces combine.... Forecasting is possible where there are regularities and recurrences of phenomena (these are rare), of where there are persisting trends whose direction, if not exact trajectory, can be plotted with statistical time-series or be formulated as historical tendencies. Necessarily, therefore, one deals with probabili ties and an array of possible projections. But the limitations of forecasting are also evident. The further one reaches ahead in time with a set of forecasts, the greater the margin for error, since the fan of the projections widens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears; Yet slower yet, oh faintly gentle springs:... List to the heavy part the music bears, "Woe weeps out her division when she sings." Droop herbs and flowers; Fall grief in showers; "Our beauties are not ours": Oh, I could still, Like melting snow upon some craggy hill, Drop, drop, drop, drop, Since nature's pride is, now, a withered daffodil.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If for Americans, at least, the Great War could sometimes be imagined as a brief, quasi-athletic lark, the Second War permitted no... such melioration by the spirit of adolescent optimism. In North Africa alone, the 1st Infantry Division spent more time in mortal contact with the enemy than all the time it spent--forming up, marching, drawing equipment, lining up at the mess hall, training, bitching--in all of the First World War. And on December 7, 1941, the American navy lost in one day more men killed--2008, to be exact--than in all the days of the earlier war. The Second World War, total and global as it was, killed worldwide, more civilian men, women, and children than soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And compared with the idiocies of Verdun, Gallipoli, or Tannenberg, it was indescribably cruel and insane. It was not until the Second World War had enacted all its madness that one could realize how near Victorian social and ethical norms the First World War really was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives;... And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you ...can fool all of the people all of the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good performance, like a human life, is a temporal affair--a process in time. It is good as a whole through being good in its pa...rts, and through their good order to one another. It cannot be called good as a whole until it is finished. During the process all we can say of it, if we speak precisely, is that it is becoming good. The same is true of a whole human life. Just as the whole performance never exists at any one time, but is a process of becoming, so a human life is also a performance in time and a process of becoming. And just as the goodness that attaches to the performance as a whole does not attach to any of its parts, so the goodness of a human life as a whole belongs to it alone, and not to any of its parts or phases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.... ... Stars of Death stood over us, and innocent Russia squirmed under the bloody boots, under the wheels of black Marias.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem... From insignificance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematis...ing the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray's Anatomy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »