Daily Inspiration Quote by Alistair Cooke

A sly little rebuke to everyone who treats prediction as power. Cooke’s line turns “prophecy” from something mystical into something social: the forecasts, verdicts, and labels other people pin on you. “Fellow men” matters here. He’s not talking about fate or divine inevitability; he’s talking about neighbors, pundits, bosses, and ideologues who insist they can tell you what you are, what you’ll do, what history “must” do next.

The phrase “incurable habit” is the knife twist. Noncompliance isn’t framed as heroic rebellion but as a persistent human tic, as ordinary and unstoppable as boredom. Cooke’s wit lands because it treats unpredictability not as an exception but as the default setting of human behavior. We don’t just fail to meet expectations; we have an almost instinctive talent for dodging the scripts written for us.

As a journalist who spent decades narrating the 20th century’s grand plans and grand failures, Cooke knew how often confident projections collapse on contact with real life. Wars end “wrong.” Revolutions betray their manifestos. Economies ignore expert models. Even personal lives refuse tidy arcs. The subtext is a warning to the prophecy-makers: certainty is often just authority in costume. It’s also a small consolation to the people being predicted at. History, Cooke suggests, is less a train on fixed tracks than a crowd with its own stubborn, ungovernable momentum.