Quotes about prophecy

Prophecy: The art and practice of selling one's credibility for future delivery.

— Ambrose Bierce

Don't ever prophesy; for if you prophesy wrong, nobody will forget it; and if you prophesy right, nobody will remember it.

— Josh Billings

The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert, and so on.

— Noam Chomsky

Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.

— Alistair Cooke

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

— Umberto Eco

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

— George Eliot

Prophecy today is hardly the romantic business that it used to be. The old tools of the trade, like the sword, the hair shirt, and the long fast in the wilderness, have given way to more contemporary, mundane instruments of doom --the book, the picket and the petition, the sit-in at City Hall.

— Jane Kramer

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.

— Walter Lippmann

The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates. Not only does he picture us caught in a tremendous man-made or God-made trap from which there is no escape, but we must also listen to him day in, day out, describe how the trap is inexorably closing. To such prophecies the human race, as presently bred and educated and situated, is incapable of listening. So some dance and some immolate themselves as human torches; some take drugs and some artists spill their creativity in sets of randomly placed dots on a white ground.

— Margaret Mead

Beware of the ides of March.

— William Shakespeare

We are all at times unconscious prophets.

— Charles Haddon Spurgeon

There is no question but that if Jesus Christ, or a great prophet from another religion, were to come back today, he would find it virtually impossible to convince anyone of his credentials despite the fact that the vast evangelical machine on American television is predicated on His imminent return among us sinners.

— Peter Ustinov

Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.

— George Eliot