Top 33 Speculative Quotes

An early fascination with higher mathematics at the university level blossomed into speculative thinking that could provide a basis for dealing with economic issues.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as ‘The Battle of Dorking’ from 1871 showed how SF’s trademark ‘what if’ scenarios could easily encompass warfare.

I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.

Sci-fi is speculative fiction. ‘Field of Dreams’ is sci-fi.

Alternatives to gold and currency and to make a big speculative vehicle – I never considered for one second having anything to do with it. I detested it the minute it had been raised.

Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict.

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.

The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.

Those who incline to very strictly utilitarian views may perhaps feel that the peculiar powers of the Analytical Engine bear upon questions of abstract and speculative science rather than upon those involving everyday and ordinary human interests.

True science is never speculative; it employs hypotheses as suggesting points for inquiry, but it never adopts the hypotheses as though they were demonstrated propositions.

I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly – poetry, literature – this speculative attitude toward life.

The risks are far greater to your child of not getting immunized than any kind of speculative potential relationship between the vaccine and the development of autism.

Fusion power is speculative and experimental. I think it is reckless to assume that the fusion problem will be cracked, but I’m happy to estimate how much power fusion could deliver, if the problems are cracked.

Because of the ‘Twilight’ series, our company gets every speculative piece of fiction from people hoping for the next ‘Twilight,’ and so you read them, and they all kind of wash over you after awhile.

One of the greatest things about the book is that everything we know about ‘It,’ it’s pretty speculative. We see it from the point of view of Loser’s and that’s what makes it so scary. We never get to know exactly what it is.

My wedding won’t be a hush-hush affair. When I get married, everyone will get to know about it… there’ll be nothing speculative about my wedding.

I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.

It’s OK to pursue speculative ideas because we don’t want to be too cozy and safe and assume that we know everything about life in the universe. However, we have to be rigorous and careful and honest and logical and scientifically meticulous when we speculate.

We have little choice but to place a certain level of trust in scientists – even when it comes to the model-driven speculative discipline of climate change. And, need it be said, most scientists take great care in being honest, principled and precise.

I shall endeavour still further to prosecute this inquiry, an inquiry I trust not merely speculative, but of sufficient moment to inspire the pleasing hope of its becoming essentially beneficial to mankind.

I don’t think I’ve ever really been a science fiction writer. I’m closer to a fantasist, speculative fiction, whatever, but labels are ultimately derogatory, and I eschew them as best I can.

I’m not very much of a reader really, because I find much of it very bad, very uninteresting, very speculative.

Sci-fi and horror, particularly, allow a storyteller to depart from, let’s say, the demands of cinema verite or kitchen-sink realism or, even, just relatable dramas and can go into areas that are either – in the case of horror – more primally effective or, in the case of sci-fi, more speculative or imaginative.

The best thing about writing speculative fiction is the opportunity to satirize the whole wide world. The America in ‘A Better World’ isn’t ours, but it’s pretty close, so I could lampoon everything from partisan politics to the cult of celebrity to our general disaffection. To me, all that is the point.

I read and write speculative fiction because I want to go someplace really different.

I pledge allegiance to the living, and I will defend art from history. I will rescue art from the future, from its attrition into taste, and from the speculative notion that it will become more valuable with time.

There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.

Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market.

I don’t want what I am saying to sound like a prophecy or anything like an analysis of modern society… these are only feelings I have, and I am the least speculative man on earth.

I love David Bohm. I started to get into speculative realism because I started reading his work.

I believe in poetic discourse, in the value of speech in a non-naturalistic way; it’s speculative.