Unforeseen Circumstances Quotes

Listen to me: everything you think you know, every relationship you've ever taken for granted, every plan or possibility you've ever hatched, every conceit or endeavor you've ever concocted, can be stripped from you in an instant. Sooner or later, it will happen. So prepare yourself. Be ready not to be ready. Be ready to be brought to your knees and beaten to dust. Because no stable foundation, no act of will, no force of cautious habit will save you from this fact: nothing is indestructible.

Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it turns out to be not what they meant, other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.

Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .

In the long run, it's impossible to make progress without sometimes having setbacks, although people who get lucky on their first attempt sometimes forget this.

Everybody's got plans... until they get hit.

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

The law of unintended consequences, far more than the Constitution, is what governs the modern presidency.

I wouldn't have expected an audience of ours to burn down our equipment.

Be careful what you wish for. There's always a catch.

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.

Through shallow intellect, the mind becomes shallow, and one eats the fly, along with the sweets.

The Nation trembled on the brink. Events moved with such speed that it was necessary to decide to act on the instant, as each successive crisis arose.

Harvard graduates being laid off. How can that be?

President Karzai was an accidental president. There was no paradigm for the conditions he faced, because no one could have imagined 9/11. He had to improvise under very difficult conditions to hold this country together.

I always try to plan things out, but they never work out the way I expect.

It was the damnedest thing, life. Once you decide exactly how things are going to go, something or someone comes along and messes it all up.

I saw the Cloud, though I did not foresee the Storm.

Man is a strange animal. He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.

The future is unpredictable.

Several highly improbable and therefore unforeseen failures.

You never know how things are going to turn out, however much you plan. But you already know that.