“Any notion that you know what's going to happen, I think is, not going to work.”

Replying to a question "about what young people who want to enter his field should study", at a book talk centered around the Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Sonyg_CwGo
Context: Well I certainly second that, I think in addition, well I mean other things I've written suggest reading a lot of history, and uh, clearly one of the things you want people to understand is the uncertainty of things. I mean, how you really have to look at a variety of alternative futures. Any notion that you know what's going to happen, I think is, not going to work.

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 "Any notion that you know what's going to happen, I think is, not going to work." by Andrew Marshall?
Andrew Marshall photo
Andrew Marshall 5
the director of the United States Department of Defense's O… 1921–2019

Related quotes

Lucian Freud photo

“I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen … that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.”

Lucian Freud (1922–2011) British painter and engraver

Interview with Martin Gayford, Independent on Sunday 26 May 2002
Other

Glenn Beck photo
Wendell Berry photo

“The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Jayber Crow

Dick Cheney photo

“Here's what I can tell you about Don Rumsfeld. You're never going to get any credit. And you'll only know how well you're doing if he gives you more work. If that happens, you're doing fine.”

Dick Cheney (1941) American politician and businessman

Quoted in Bob Woodward's, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, Simon & Schuster, 2006
2000s, 2006

“Some things fail and others succeed. Well, then you get quite desperate, and you think: 'I am going to work and work and I'm not going to have any failures.' But then you find out that failures are inevitable; you can't even draw a straight line, you know that.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

as quoted in A House Divided: American Art Since 1955, Anne M. G. Wagner, Univ. of California Press 2012, p. 205 - note 8
1980 - 2000

Max Wertheimer photo
Philip Pullman photo
Thelonious Monk photo

“I don't know where it's going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.”

Thelonious Monk (1917–1982) American jazz pianist and composer

When questioned as to the future of jazz, as quoted in Jet magazine (31 March 1960), p. 30

David Lynch photo

“You just do these things that you fall in love with, and you never know what's going to happen.”

The Circle, p. 21
Catching the Big Fish (2006)
Context: I like the saying "The world is as you are." And I think films are as you are. That's why, although the frames of a film are always the same — the same number, in the same sequence, with the same sounds — every screening is different. The difference is sometimes subtle but it's there. It depends on the audience. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. Each person is looking and thinking and feeling and coming up with his or her own sense of things. And it's probably different from what I fell in love with.
So you don’t know how it's going to hit people. But if you thought about how it's going to hit people, or if it's going to hurt someone, or if it's going to do this or do that, then you would have to stop making films. You just do these things that you fall in love with, and you never know what's going to happen.

Related topics