Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury (born 22 August 1920, died 5 June 2012) wrote Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The Martian Chronicles and hundreds of short stories, and spent six decades insisting in public that he was not a prophet. The predict-versus-prevent line is the compressed form of that lifelong protest: he repeated it in essays, interviews and lectures, and by 1977 it was already circulating with his name on it. He is the earliest person on record credited with the thought — though Quote Investigator stops short of declaring him its inventor.