Life & Wisdom Quote by Stanley Schmidt

Arrogance, Schmidt implies, is less a personality flaw than a forecasting error. The line takes aim at a familiar modern posture: the confident claim that the big questions are basically settled, that progress now means fine-tuning rather than being overturned. Calling that belief "presumptuous" is a quiet scalpel. It doesn’t accuse people of stupidity; it indicts their certainty. The real target is a culture that treats today’s consensus as destiny, mistaking the current map for the territory.

Schmidt’s phrasing works because it welds humility to suspense. "Already know" and "never get" set up an absolutist mindset, then "big surprises" punctures it with a promise: reality is still capable of humiliating us. The subtext isn’t just scientific modesty; it’s an argument about power. Declaring the era of surprises over is a way to police imagination, to frame dissent or weird ideas as childish because the adults have supposedly closed the book.

Context matters: Schmidt is known in science fiction circles, a genre built on the premise that tomorrow won’t politely resemble today. In that tradition, the quote reads like a rebuttal to end-of-history complacency, whether it’s technological triumphalism, institutional self-confidence, or the cozy belief that the future will be incremental. It’s also a warning disguised as encouragement: surprises can be breakthroughs, but they can just as easily be shocks. Either way, the only rational stance is readiness, not certainty.