Humans sometimes make surprising choices, and human history is full of uncertainties.

History isn't something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.

History moves in strange ways.

It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance of their effects. All the more unpredictable and surprising to us will be the course of future events.

There is little warrant for the belief that we know the laws of history well enough to make projections of any great reliability. Most of the turning points of history, great and small, were surprises to both their participants and the analysts of the day, whatever their doctrine.

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

History is a construct...Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still there are definitive moments...We can look at these events and say that after them things were never the same again.

History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

I disbelieve in both cycles of history and ends of history. History is the interaction of many complex systems. There are certain long-run processes (notably exponential gains in productivity through the development of technology and the “suprasecular” decline of nominal and real interest rates as a result of capital accumulation) punctuated by, well, one disaster after another. These disasters are either randomly distributed or follow a power law (i.e. there are lots of little earthquakes, pandemics or wars, but a few cataclysmic ones). At unpredictable intervals, the global system is tipped into a major transition by a disturbance that can be quite small, if not quite as small as Edward Lorenz’s famous butterfly in the Amazon setting off a tornado in Texas. Russia’s war in Ukraine — destructive certainly, but still a relatively small conflict by 20th-century standards — can be enough to trigger a “conflict avalanche.”

We cannot explain the choices that history makes, but we can say something very important about them: history’s choices are not made for the benefit of humans. There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along.

I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don’t know what that event will be.

I know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.

History is the unfolding of miscalculations.