I vote for Newton Minow, who, as FCC Chair stated on May 9, 1961,
“When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.”
Oh, and maybe, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”, by that other guy.
I like this one. I think the OP could be better worded… obviously, it’s easy to make statements that are essentially 100% accurate but of no particular significance, like, “I was born on July 23, 1955.” Accurate predictions are more interesting. Another example is the famous forecast of the outcome of the 1920 Republican National Convention by Harry Daugherty, Warren G. Harding’s political manager:
“I don’t expect Senator Harding to be nominated on the first, second, or third ballots, but I think we can afford to take chances that about 11 minutes after two, Friday morning of the convention, when 15 or 12 weary men are sitting around a table, someone will say: ‘Who will we nominate?’ At that decisive time, the friends of Harding will suggest him and we can well afford to abide by the result.”
Harding was a reluctant candidate who got between 6% and 9% on the first 6 ballots, and was nominated on the tenth ballot, pretty much exactly as Daugherty had said.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, warning us about the military/industrial complex.
Second place, Grorge Orwell warning us that superpowers will squander resources and keep their people cowed and oppressed by newspeak about an imaginary enemy in order to protect the interests of the elite with wealth and power.
In the first place, that is a statement of opinion, not of fact, and thus is neither accurate nor inaccurate.
In the second place, it’s clearly wrong. The first sentence, anyway. Mad Men is probably the most bloody brilliant TV series better, but it’s nowhere near as enjoyable to me as Valerie Martin’s novel A Recent Martyr, or Miss Saigon on Broadway, or The Fellowship of the Ring on an Imax screen, or Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes.
There was a third place but I forgot what it was while trying to pick an album.
In the fourth place, the answer to the thread question is obviously E=mc[sup]2[/sup].
OK, cheating, because it’s 19th century, but still worthwhile:
*Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal … A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all … I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where … Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off. * Otto von Bismarck (1878)
The calculation of the anomalous dipole moment of the election from Quantum Electrodynamics, from Julian Schwinger. And others. OK, that’s not 1 person, it’s a collective of several people. But the calculation has been done to amazing accuracy, and an astounding level of agreement with the measured empirical value. They agree to a part per billion!
The first sentence, anyway. Mad Men is probably the most bloody brilliant TV series better, but it’s nowhere near as enjoyable to me as Valerie Martin’s novel A Recent Martyr, or Miss Saigon on Broadway, or The Fellowship of the Ring on an Imax screen, or Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes.