Clouded Vision
January 1, 1984
What do we mean when we say someone has vision? In part we mean the person is sufficiently aware of current events to identify future trends. Stories of those who cornered the market in raw widgets just two years before raw widgets became more valuable than diamonds are the stuff of which business legends are made. For pastors, the story takes a little different turn. The pastoral visionary is the one who established a fledgling church on the Yucca Salt Flats just one year before a colony of six thousand multimillionaires decided the only place to build their new homes was the Yucca Salt Flats. But one rarely hears about those whose vision, though emphatically stated, turns out to be less than 20/20. Several years ago, Paul Dickson, author of The Future File, noted in Saturday Review several of these avisionaries and the comments that made them infamous. Anesthesia
The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it today. Knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient. To this compulsory combination we shall have to adjust ourselves. -Dr. Alfred Velpeau, 1839 The Atomic Bomb
That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives. -Admiral William D. Leahy to President Truman, 1945 Aviation
The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be. -Simon Newcomb, astronomer, 1903 Insanity
We are gradually approaching, with the decadence ...
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