“If human beings can simply decide on what they want to do and then do it, then forecasting is impossible. Free will is beyond forecasting. But what is most interesting about humans is how unfree they are. It is possible for people today to have ten children, but hardly anyone does. We are deeply constrained in what we do by the time and place in which we live.”

Source: The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009), p. 252

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If human beings can simply decide on what they want to do and then do it, then forecasting is impossible. Free will is …" by George Friedman?
George Friedman photo
George Friedman 25
American businessman and political scientist 1949

Related quotes

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor photo

“As we are human, we can't do what we can't do; as we're neurotic, we can't do what we can.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis

Charles Bukowski photo
Richard Feynman photo

“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

The Value of Science (1955)
Context: We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
... It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming "This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!" we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.
... It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

“What did you do today? Nothing say our little children, and so do I. What we most are is what we keep mistaking for nothing.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#155
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Ronald Reagan photo
Mark Tobey photo

“Every artist's problem today is: What will we do with the human?”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

Quote from exhibition catalogue, Mark Tobey, 1951, as cited in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p.13
1950's

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien photo

“So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

Context: Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

Denzel Washington photo

Related topics