Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying 'Just watch!'

For the past two years President Obama has promised our children the moon stars rainbows unicorns and universal health care for all. But the White House Santa's cradle-to-grave entitlement mandates are a spectacularly predictable bust.

It is I claim nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.

The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options as we have in the past.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants but they are dumbed down and I hate it when they dumb them down.

The universal human laws - need love for the beloved fear hunger periodic exaltation the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant predictable reliable universal and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.

The conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect. It seems too pat and predictable too clearly a matter of politics rather than faith.

We judged that a sudden disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy with lower equity prices further downward pressure on home values and less access to credit for companies and households.

Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. It introduced the notion that there existed certain predictable and identifiable processes by which dreams were formed.