Rick Perlstein Quotes

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

History is totally unpredictable.

We never really know what's around the corner when we're filming - what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.

History proceeds in zig zags through crooked paths.

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no one knew what was coming.

As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream.

Every time I make a plan, God laughs at me.

Life is so unlike theory.

History is full of times when the inevitable front-runner is inevitable right up until he or she is no longer inevitable.

The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it.

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

Our plans never turn out as tasty as reality.

I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works.

You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.

Life doesn't always give us what we are expecting.

The one thing we can all be sure about in politics is you are as well to expect the unexpected.

I don't want to set the world up for surprises.

Life is always surprising to me. When you think it's going to get dull, it never really does.

You never know what events are going to transpire to get you home.

Some things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for them.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

I don't know that I'd necessarily want to see into the future. I don't want to know what's happening next.