Future

• The future is mysterious. Now we’re seeing an entire generation lost to war. My hopes for the future are not personal; they’re for my people. My hopes are for peace, and only for peace.
  • Hani Abbas Interview (2013)

• "Don't tell me about the future." said Ford. "I've been all over the future. Spend half my time there. It's the same as anywhere else. Anywhen else. Whatever. Just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air."
  • Ford Prefect in Mostly Harmless, novel by Douglas Adams

• Should not a true understanding of life promote care for the future along with the present? This is the immediate duty of every scientist. Until now scientists have dealt with life as finite — is it not now their mission to see life as extending into Infinity? 553.
  • Agni Yoga, Agni Yoga (1929)

• The problem is that no one gives much of a shit about the future until it actually happens. In the fable of the grasshopper and the ant, human beings are the most frivolous breed of grasshopper that ever was.
  • Nina Allan, The Common Tongue (2016), in Jonathan Strahan (ed.) Drowned Worlds (e-book edition, ISBN 978-1-84997-930-6)

• Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
  • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations, Book VII, 8 (Penguin Classics edition of Meditations, translated by Maxwell Staniforth).

• The generation which will come into active thought expression at the end of this century... will inaugurate the framework, structure and fabric of the New Age [of Aquarius], which will start with certain premises, which today are the dream of the more exalted dreamers, and which will develop the civilisatation... This coming age will be as predominantly the age of group interplay, group idealism, and group consciousness, as the Piscean Age has been one of personality unfoldment and emphasis, personality focus, and personality consciousness. Selfishness, as we now understand it, will gradually disappear, for the will of the individual will voluntarily be blended into the group will.
  • Alice Bailey, The Rays & the Initiations (1960)

• The ancient symbol for the sign Aquarius (into which our Sun is now entering) is that of the Water-carrier, the man with a pitcher of water. This passing of the Sun into the sign Aquarius is an astronomical fact... not an astrological prognostication. The great spiritual achievement and evolutionary event of that age will be the communion and human relationships established among all peoples, enabling men everywhere to sit down together... and share the bread and wine (symbols of nourishment). Preparations for that shared feast (symbolically speaking) are on their way, and those preparations are being made by the masses of men themselves, as they fight and struggle and legislate for the economic sustenance of their nations, and as the theme of food occupies the attention of legislators everywhere. This sharing, beginning on the physical plane, will prove equally true of all human relations and this will be the great gift of the Aquarian Age to humanity.
  • Alice Bailey, The Reappearance of the Christ (1947)

• Energies emanating from... Aquarius... will (through the effect of its potent force) stimulate... men into a new coherency, into a brotherhood of humanity which will ignore all racial and national differences and will carry the life of men forward into synthesis and unity. This means a tide of unifying life of such power that one cannot now vision it, but which—in a thousand years—will have welded all mankind into a perfect brotherhood.
  • Alice Bailey, Treatise on W.M. (1934)

• Once you realize you deserve a bright future, letting go of your dark past is the best choice you will ever make.
  • Roy T. Bennett (February 2, 2020): The Light in the Heart: Inspirational Thoughts for Living Your Best Life. Source: 2019-09-30 Facebook.com Post by Roy T. Bennett.

• Every choice we make allows us to manipulate the future. Do I ask Adrienne or Suzanne to the spring dance? Do I take my holiday on Corsica or on Risa? A person's life, their future, hinges on each of a thousand choices. Living is making choices. Now you ask me to believe that if I make a choice other than the one found in your history books, then your past will be irrevocably altered. Well, you know, Professor, perhaps I don't give a damn about your past, because your past is my future and as far as I'm concerned, it hasn't been written yet.
  • "A Matter of Time" (30 September 1991) by Rick Berman.
  • Spoken by Jean-Luc Picard, in Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "A Matter of Time" (30 September 1991) by Rick Berman.

• There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them. Desire, the strongest thing in the world, is itself all future, and it is not for nothing that in all the religions the motive is always forwards to an endless futurity of bliss or annihilation. Now that religion gives place to science the paradisical future of the soul fades before the Utopian future of the species, and still the future rules. But always there is, on the other side, destiny, that which inevitably will happen, a future here concerned not as the other was with man and his desires, but blindly and inexorably with the whole universe of space and time. The Buddhist seeks to escape from the Wheel of Life and Death, the Christian passes through them in the faith of another world to come, the modern reformer, as unrealistic but less imaginative, demands his chosen future in this world of men.
  Can we in any better way reconcile desire and fate?
  • John Desmond Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: an Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929) Ch. 1 The Future, pp. 7-8.

• FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Word Book (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

• People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.
  • Ray Bradbury, Beyond 1984: The People Machines. (1979).

• Die Zukunft wird nicht gemeistert von denen, die am Vergangenen kleben.
  • Those who adhere to the past won't be able to cope with the future.
  • Willy Brandt, speech at the extraordinary convention of the Social Democratic Party of Germany on 18 November 1971, book source: "Reden und Interviews: Herbst 1971 bis Frühjahr 1973", Hoffmann und Campe, 1973, p. 25.

• Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future.
  • Ashleigh Brilliant. As quoted at goodreads.com. Archived from the original on January 9, 2024.

• Many religions speak of the End of Days. It refers not to the end of the world, but rather the end of our current age – Pisces, which began at the time of Christ’s birth, spanned two thousand years, and waned with the passing of the millennium. Now that we’ve passed into the Age of Aquarius, the End of Days has arrived.
  • Dan Brown, in The Da Vinci Code (2003)

• We believe in trying to stick with businesses ... where we think we can see the future reasonably well.
  • Warren Buffett, (June 28, 2018)"1996 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Warren Buffett Charlie Munger FULL Q&A". IDP, YouTube. (quote at 2:02:20 of 4:54:01)

• You can never plan the future by the past.
  • Edmund Burke, letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), Volume IV, p. 55. Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 304-06.

• I come before you and assume the Presidency at a moment rich with promise. We live in a peaceful, prosperous time, but we can make it better. For a new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree. A new breeze is blowing, and a nation refreshed by freedom stands ready to push on. There is new ground to be broken, and new action to be taken. There are times when the future seems thick as a fog; you sit and wait, hoping the mists will lift and reveal the right path. But this is a time when the future seems a door you can walk right through into a room called tomorrow.
  Great nations of the world are moving toward democracy through the door to freedom. Men and women of the world move toward free markets through the door to prosperity. The people of the world agitate for free expression and free thought through the door to the moral and intellectual satisfactions that only liberty allows.
  We know what works: Freedom works. We know what's right: Freedom is right. We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on Earth: through free markets, free speech, free elections, and the exercise of free will unhampered by the state.
  • George H. W. Bush, Inaugural Address (1989), Washington, D. C. (20 January 1989) Full text online at Yale University

• I do not mistrust the future; I do not fear what is ahead. For our problems are large, but our heart is larger. Our challenges are great, but our will is greater. And if our flaws are endless, God's love is truly boundless.
  Some see leadership as high drama, and the sound of trumpets calling, and sometimes it is that. But I see history as a book with many pages, and each day we fill a page with acts of hopefulness and meaning. The new breeze blows, a page turns, the story unfolds. And so today a chapter begins, a small and stately story of unity, diversity, and generosity — shared, and written, together.
  • George H. W. Bush, Inaugural Address (1989), Washington, D. C. (20 January 1989) Full text online at Yale University

• The Terminator: It must end here...or I am the future.
  • James Cameron, William Wisher; Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991.

• The future will soon be a thing of the past.
  • George Carlin, Napalm and Silly Putty (2001), p. 260.

• How we remember the past determines the shape of the future.
  • James Carroll (March 22, 2005) "If Kennan had prevailed". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on March 4, 2022.

• Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.
  • Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962)

• Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ. Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.
  • Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (1956). Section "December 31".

• The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
  • Winston Churchill, speech at Harvard University, September 6, 1943, in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations(1999), Knowles & Partington, p. 215.

• Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
  • Winston Churchill, Speech in the House of Commons, June 18, 1940 "War Situation".

• We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward cross the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.
  • Winston Churchill, Speech at Zurich University (September 19, 1946) (partial text) ([1]).

• I've seen the future, brother; it is murder.
  • Leonard Cohen, The Future.

• Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point, answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be only?
  • A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol

• Men will seem to see new destructions in the sky. The flames that fall from it will seem to rise in it and to fly from it with terror. They will hear every kind of animals speak in human language. They will instantaneously run in person in various parts of the world, without motion. They will see the greatest splendour in the midst of darkness. O! marvel of the human race! What madness has led you thus! You will speak with animals of every species and they with you in human speech. You will see yourself fall from great heights without any harm and torrents will accompany you, and will mingle with their rapid course.
  • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XX Humorous Writings, as translated by Edward MacCurdy.

• The complement of the word useful is the word man, but it is also the word future. It is man insofar as he is, according to the formula of Ponge, "the future of man." Indeed, cut off from his transcendence, reduced to the facticity of his presence, an individual is nothing; it is by his project that he fulfills himself, by the end at which he aims that he justifies himself; thus, this justification is always to come. Only the future can take the present for its own and keep it alive by surpassing it. A choice will become possible in the light of the future, which is the meaning of tomorrow because the present appears as the facticity which must be transcended toward freedom.
  • Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity. Philosophical Library. 1948. ISBN 978-0-8065-0160-4.  Part III: The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity

• We cannot build the future on injustice.
  • F. W. de Klerk, on The Washington Journal of C-SPAN (11 June 1999)

• Take hold of the future or the future will take hold of you -- be futurewise.
  • Patrick Dixon, Futurist and author, Futurewise 1998/2005.

• Whatever the future may have in store for us, one thing is certain... Human thought will never go backward. When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on till it becomes the thought of the world... Now that it has got fairly fixed in the minds of the few, it is bound to become fixed in the minds of the many, and be supported at last by a great cloud of witnesses, which no man can number and no power can withstand.
  • Frederick Douglass, speech to the International Council of Women (31 March 1888).

• The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.
  • Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, Chapter 4.

• We have known about the dangers we pose to ourselves for decades and yet we continue sleepwalking toward a grim future, somehow numb to what it will mean for our children and theirs. Almost every depiction of our world's future in popular culture is a dystopian vision of a planet piled high with garbage, a ruined wasteland. They are accurate reflections of the fear in our hearts. But if dreams are maps, could a great dream of our future possibly help us find our way out of this nightmare?
  • Ann Druyan Cosmos: Possible Worlds (2020)

• If we could only just see our lives as links in the chain of life, and see as our first responsibility to get that next link in the chain safely to the future
  • Ann Druyan Interview with Astronomy Magazine (2020)

• Lawrence Bragg, a shrewd observer of the birth of quantum mechanics, summed up the situation in a few words: "Everything in the future is a wave — everything in the past is a particle."
  • Freeman Dyson, Freeman Dyson posits "QM cannot be a complete description of nature" @ J.A. Wheeler's 90th birthday". YouTube (6 March 2014). (quote at 22:51 of 33:06)

• As it turns out, the future of the ocean, the creatures who live there, and our own future are inextricably linked.
  • Sylvia Earle The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One (2009)

• on balance, if I had to choose the most interesting and important time in all of human history to live, it would be now. As never before, and perhaps as never again, the choices made in the near future will determine mankind's success, or lack of it. These are the "good old days" sure to be envied by those in the future.
  • Sylvia Earle Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans (1995)

• I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
  • Albert Einstein, Attributed in The Encarta Book of Quotations to an interview on the Belgenland (December 1930), which was the ship on which he arrived in New York that month. According to The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2010), p. 18, the quote also appears as "Aphorism, 1945-1946" in the Einstein Archives 36-570. Calaprice speculates that "perhaps it was recalled later and inserted into the archives under the later date." According to a snippet on Google Books, the phrase '"I never think of the future," he said. "It comes soon enough."' appears in The Literary Digest: Volume 107 on p. 29, in an article titled "We May Not 'Get' Relativity, But We Like Einstein" from 27 December 1930. The snippet also discusses the "welcome to Professor Einstein on the Belgenland" in New York.

• Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.
  • Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Citadelle or The Wisdom of the Sands (1948).

• It is the future that creates his present.
  All is an interminable chain of longing.
  • Robert Frost, "Escapist — Never (1962)

• It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries. Corollary to this we find that we no sooner get a problem solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of additional problems in a most beautiful payoff of heretofore unknown, previously unrecognized, and as-yet unsolved problems.
  • Buckminster Fuller Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975).

(full text online)

• Neither the great political and financial power structures of the world, nor the specialization-blinded professionals, nor the population in general realize... that it is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known.
• It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival.
• War is obsolete. It could never have been done before. Only ten years ago... technology reached the point where it could be done. Since then the invisible technological-capability revolution has made it ever easier so to do.
• It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry. The essence of livingry is human-life advantaging and environment controlling. With the highest aeronautical and engineering facilities of the world redirected from weaponry to livingry production, all humanity would have the option of becoming enduringly successful.
• All previous revolutions have been political—in them the have-not majority has attempted revengefully to pull down the economically advantaged minority. If realized, this historically greatest design revolution will joyously elevate all humanity to unprecedented heights.
• All of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly — right now.
• Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. . . . Humanity is in ‘final exam’ as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe

• The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.
  • Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future (1963)
  • Frequently paraphrased as:
    • We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
      • We Cannot Predict the Future, But We Can Invent It. Quote Investigator (September 27, 2012). Retrieved on 2016-11-6. Archived from the orginal on October 24, 2024. Cites:
        • 1963 March 28, New Scientist, "Books: How to be dignified though useless, by Nigel Calder, [Review of “Inventing the future” by Dennis Gabor]", Page 712, Column 2, published by Reed Business Information: "His basic approach is that we cannot predict the future, but we can invent it, hence his title."
  • Variants:
    • The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
      • Alan Kay (1971) at a 1971 meeting of PARC (Archived from the orginal on October 24, 2024.); also Stanford Engineering, Volume 1, Number 1, Autumn 1989, pg 1-6
  • Similar remarks are attributed to Peter Drucker and to Dandridge M. Cole ([2], citation actually "We predict the future because we must in order to live.")

• I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.
  • Mahatma Gandhi, in Anthony Parel Gandhi, Freedom, and Self-rule, Lexington Books, 1 January 2000, p. 59

• Marty, the future isn't written. It can be changed. You know that. Anyone can make their future whatever they want it to be.
  • Doc Emmett Brown, (played by Christopher Lloyd, Back to the Future Part III (1990), screenplay by Bob Gale

• If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
  • John Galsworthy, Swan Song (1928), Part II, Chapter 6.

• The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.
  • William Gibson, is reported to have first said this in an interview on Fresh Air, NPR (31 August 1993) {unverified}, he repeated it, prefacing it with "As I've said many times…" in "The Science in Science Fiction" on Talk of the Nation, NPR (30 November 1999, Timecode 11:55). See also The future has arrived... - Quote Investigator.

• To-day is the parent of to-morrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future. That is the law of life, individual and social. Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society. The means used to prepare the future become its cornerstone.
  • Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923), existing in manuscript as "My Two Years in Russia" this work was published as My Disillusionment with Russia (1923), and My Further Disillusionment with Russia (1924) and finally as a complete one-volume edition (1925)

• We often refer to space as the final frontier. But the older I get, the more I come to believe that the true final frontier is time. In command, as in life, what we do in crisis often weighs upon us less heavily than what we wish we had done, what could have been. Time offers many opportunities, but it rarely offers second chances. And as steps forward go I would like to acknowledge your classmate the first fully Romulan cadet at Starfleet Academy: Elnor. May you all go boldly into a future freed from the shackles of the past.
  • Spoken by Jean-Luc Picard, in Star Trek: Picard episode "The Star Gazer" (March 3, 2022) by Akiva Goldsman and Terry Matalas

• The Great Western Disease is that we fixate on the future at the expense of enjoying the life we're living now.
  • Marshall Goldsmith (2010), What Got You Here Won't Get You There. p. 81

• The greatest danger to our future is apathy.
  • Jane Goodall, "The Power of One", Time (August 26, 2002).

• As I traveled, talking about these issues, I met so many young people who had lost hope. Some were depressed; some were apathetic; some were angry and violent. And when I talked to them, they all more or less felt this way because we had compromised their future and the world of tomorrow was not going to sustain their great-grandchildren.
  • Jane Goodall "Then & Now: Jane Goodall", CNN (June 19, 2005) Then & Now: Jane Goodall

• Le futur n'est pas ce qui vient vers nous, mais ce vers quoi nous allons
  • The future is not what is coming at us, but what we are headed for.
  • Jean-Marie Guyau (Le Genèse de l'idée du temps), translation by Astragale.

• Time is always moving on; nothing can stop it. We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future. The more compassionate you are, the more you will find inner peace.
  • Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama,Official twitter page of the Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Tweet from 8. April 2019 11:30 am. Archived from the original on March 10, 2022 and January 9, 2024.

• Even if some different theory is discovered in the future, I don’t think time travel will ever be possible. If it were, we would have been overrun by tourists from the future by now.
  • Stephen Hawking [3]

• A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.
  • Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973).

• Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.
  • Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

• If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.
  • Hazel Henderson, The Politics of the Solar Age (1981). Quoted in The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women ed. Rosalie Maggio (1996).

• I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.
  • Patrick Henry, Give me liberty, or give me death! (1775)

• In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
  • Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition (1973), Section 32

• The way I see it is that there're two types of people: those who spend their lives trying to build a future, and those who spend their lives trying to rebuild the past.
  • Dan Houser, Michael Unsworth, Rupert Humphries Max Payne 3.

• Why? Why, to give you a taste of your future, a preview of things to come.
  • Spoken by Q (played by John de Lancie) in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Q Who" (8 May 1989) by Maurice Hurley. See also: Beginning of Youtube Video "First encounter with the Borg | Star Trek TNG" (20.03.2021) by user "Riker's Beard".

• I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!
  • Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams (1 August 1816).

• Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.
  • Jewish intellectuals Letters to The Times: New Palestine Party: Visit of Menachem Begin and Aim of Political Movement Discussed (4 December 1948) The New York Times

• At the beginning of the new millennium, and at the close of the Great Jubilee during which we celebrated the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus and a new stage of the Church's journey begins, our hearts ring out with the words of Jesus when one day, after speaking to the crowds from Simon's boat, he invited the Apostle to "put out into the deep" for a catch: "Duc in altum" (Lk 5:4). Peter and his first companions trusted Christ's words, and cast the nets. "When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish" (Lk 5:6). Duc in altum! These words ring out for us today, and they invite us to remember the past with gratitude, to live the present with enthusiasm and to look forward to the future with confidence: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever" (Heb 13:8).
  • Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Novo Millenio Ineunte of His Holiness John Paul II to the Bishop Clergy and Lay Faithful at the close of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 (6 January 2001). Archived from the original on April 16, 2022.

• The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization….
  The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.
  The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.
  It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
  But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.
  • Lyndon B. Johnson, remarks at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (May 22, 1964). Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–64, book 1, p. 704.

• How many white children have gone uneducated, how many white families have lived in stark poverty, how many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we have wasted our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror? So I say to all of you here, and to all in the Nation tonight, that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future.
  • Lyndon B. Johnson, "Special Message to the Congress: The American Promise," March 15, 1965. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.

• It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that there is a sort of foreknowledge of the coming series of events.
  • Carl Jung Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960) p. 94

• People have a hard time imagining a near future that is fundamentally different from and better than the present.
  • William H. Katerberg, Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction (2008), University Press of Kansas, ISBN 978-070061609-1, p. 186

• The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
  • Alan Kay (1971) at a 1971 meeting of PARC. Archived from the orginal on October 24, 2024.
  • Similar remarks are attributed to Peter Drucker and Dandridge M. Cole.
  • Cf. Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future (1963): "The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented."
    • Nigel Calder reviewed Gabor's book and wrote, "we cannot predict the future, but we can invent it..."

• The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.
  • Alan Kay in 1984 in his paper Inventing the Future which appears in The AI Business: The Commercial Uses of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Patrick Henry Winston and Karen Prendergast.. As quoted by Eugene Wallingford in a post entitled ALAN KAY'S TALKS AT OOPSLA on November 06, 2004 9:03 PM at the website of the Computer Science section of the University of Northern Iowa.

• The young inspire the middle-aged and old with courage, and they project our vision where it belongs, into the future.
  • Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz “Nine Suggestions For Radicals, or Lessons From the Gulf War” in The Issue is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence and Resistance (1992)

• Here our interest is directed to the temporal dimension of legality, the way law stands in relation to the past, the present, and the future. Law in the modern era is, we believe, one of the most important of our society’s technologies for preserving memory. Just as the use of precedent to legitimate legal decisions fixes law in a particular relation to the past, memory may be attached, or attach itself, to law and be preserved in and through law. Where this is the case, it serves as one way of orienting ourselves to the future. As Drucilla Cornell puts it: “Legal interpretation demands that we remember the future.” In that phrase, Cornell reminds us that there are, in fact, two audiences for every legal act, the audience of the present and the audience of the future. Law materializes memory in documents, transcripts, written opinions; it reenacts the past, both intentionally and unconsciously, and it is one place where the present speaks to the future through acts of commemoration.
  • Thomas R. Kearns (August 2002). History, Memory, and the Law. University of Michigan Press. p.12-13

• Because the litigated case creates a record, courts can become archives in which that record serves as the materialization of memory. Due process guarantees an opportunity to be heard by, and an opportunity to speak to, the future. It is the guarantee that legal institutions can be turned into museums of unnecessary, unjust, undeserved pain and death. The legal hearing provides lawyers and litigants an opportunity to write and record history by creating narratives of present injustices, and to insist on memory in the face of denial. By recording such history and constructing such narratives lawyers and litigants call on an imagined future to choose Justice over the “jurispathic” tendencies of the moment.
  • Thomas R. Kearns (August 2002). History, Memory, and the Law. University of Michigan Press. p.13

• Law is one site to both “remember the future” and to insure that the future remembers. Perhaps by paying attention to how law serves memory we can gain new understandings of law’s crucial role in knitting together our past, present and future. Perhaps by attending to the contestation that inevitably accompanies efforts to materialize memory in law we can gain a better understanding of the ways that social conflict plays itself out on the terrain of remembrance.
  • Thomas R. Kearns (August 2002). History, Memory, and the Law. University of Michigan Press. pp.13-14

• My call is not to those who believe they belong to the past. My call is to those who believe in the future.
  • John F. Kennedy, Speech at Civic Auditorium, Seattle, Washington (6 September 1960)

• We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.
  • John F. Kennedy, Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech, delivered on 15 July 1960 to the Democratic National Convention at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

• There may be those who wish to hear more--more promises to this group or that--more harsh rhetoric about the men in the Kremlin--more assurances of a golden future, where taxes are always low and subsidies ever high. But my promises are in the platform you have adopted--our ends will not be won by rhetoric and we can have faith in the future only if we have faith in ourselves.
  • John F. Kennedy, Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech, delivered on 15 July 1960 to the Democratic National Convention at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

• For if Freedom and Communism were to compete for man's allegiance in a world at peace, I would look to the future with ever increasing confidence.
  • John F. Kennedy, State of the Union address, January 30, 1961. The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961, p. 23.

• But history may well remember this as a week for an act of lesser immediate impact, and that is the decision by the United States and the Soviet Union to seek concrete agreements on the joint exploration of space. Experience has taught us that an agreement to negotiate does not always mean a negotiated agreement. But should such a joint effort be realized, its significance could well be tremendous for us all. In terms of space science, our combined knowledge and efforts can benefit the people of all the nations: joint weather satellites to provide more ample warnings against destructive storms--joint communications systems to draw the world more closely together--and cooperation in space medicine research and space tracking operations to speed the day when man will go to the moon and beyond. But the scientific gains from such a joint effort would offer, I believe, less realized returns than the gains for world peace. For a cooperative Soviet-American effort in space science and exploration would emphasize the interests that must unite us, rather than those that always divide us. It offers us an area in which the stale and sterile dogmas of the cold war could be literally left a quarter of a million miles behind. And it would remind us on both sides that knowledge, not hate, is the passkey to the future--that knowledge transcends national antagonisms--that it speaks a universal language--that it is the possession not of a single class, or of a single nation or a single ideology, but of all mankind.
  • John F. Kennedy, Address at the University of California at Berkeley (March 23, 1962). Delivered at Memorial Stadium at the University of California in Berkeley, California. Source: Address at the University of California at Berkeley, March 23, 1962. Boston: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum. Archived from the original on June 24, 2024.

• I sometimes think that we are too much impressed by the clamor of daily events. The newspaper headlines and the television screens give us a short view. They so flood us with the stop-press details of daily stories that we lose sight of one of the great movements of history. Yet it is the profound tendencies of history and not the passing excitements that will shape our future.
  • John F. Kennedy, Address at the University of California at Berkeley (March 23, 1962). Delivered at Memorial Stadium at the University of California in Berkeley, California. Source: Address at the University of California at Berkeley, March 23, 1962. Boston: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum. Archived from the original on June 24, 2024.

• There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.
  • John F. Kennedy, Speech to a joint session of the Dail and the Seanad, Dublin, Ireland (28 June 1963)

• You know, you read about the future. You can't help that. I don't look upon the future. I am not a politician. I am not worried about the future at all. I don't like to run it down. I don't like to think of it being too dark because I expect to spend all the rest of my life there and I don't want to have a nasty end to it.
  • Charles Kettering, "Mr. Kettering's Talk", News and Views, General Motors Acceptance Corporation, General Exchange Insurance Corporation, Motors Insurance Corporation, 1936, p. 46
  • Variants:
    • I object to people running down the future. I am going to live all the rest of my life there, and I would like it to be a nice place, polished, bright, glistening, and glorious.
      • Quoted in Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering, by T. A. Boyd 1957, pp. 3–4 (Internet Archive, Google Books)
    • My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.
      • Common, since 1947; example: Instruments and Control Systems, Volume 20, 1947, p. 374

• But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
  • John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), chapter 3, p. 80.

• The future: a dark, desolate world. A world of war, suffering, loss on both sides. Mutants, and the humans who dared to help them, fighting an enemy we cannot defeat. Are we destined down this path, destined to destroy ourselves like so many species before us? Or can we evolve fast enough to change ourselves... change our fate? Is the future truly set? The past: a new and uncertain world. A world of endless possibilities and infinite outcomes. Countless choices define our fate: each choice, each moment, a moment in the ripple of time. Enough ripple, and you change the tide... for the future is never truly set.
  • Prof. Charles Xavier/Professor X (played by Patrick Stewart, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), screenplay by Simon Kinberg

• Every feeling that looks to the future elevates human nature; for life is never so low or so little as when it concentrates itself on the present. The miserable wants, the small desires, and the petty pleasures of daily existence have nothing in common with those mighty dreams which, looking forward for action and action's reward, redeem the earth over which they walk with steps like those of an angel, beneath which spring up glorious and immortal flowers. The imagination is man's noblest and most spiritual faculty ; and that ever dwells on the to-come.
  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon Francesca Carrara (1834), Vol III, page 161

• Not to the present is our hour confined,
  The great and shadowy future is assigned
  To be the glorious empire of the mind.
  
  The past was once the future, and it wrought
  In the high presence of on-looking thought ;
  All that we have, was by its efforts brought.
  
  To-day creates to-morrow, and the tree
  Of good or ill grows in past hours, what we
  Make for the future — certain is to be.
  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Ethel Churchill (or The Two Brides) (1838), Vol III. Chapter 8

• Two things make the future real, the artist's imagination and the worker's hope. Fascism destroys both.
  • John Langdon-Davies, Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. Left Review. 1937. . Quoted in Buchanan, Tom (1997). Britain and the Spanish Civil War. Cambridge University Press. p. 32. ISBN 978-0-521-45569-5. 

• With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.
  • Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (4 March 1865)

• Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burke's words, a man to his country with "ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron." That is why young men die in battle for their country's sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.
  • Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (1955), chapter 3, part 2, p. 36. The quotation is from Edmund Burke's speech on "Conciliation with America" (1775).

• The more you observe life in relation to yourself the more you will see the fact that you are hardly ever correct when you think about something in the future. The future exists only in imagination; and that is why, no matter how hard you try to imagine it, you will not be able to predict the future with total certainty.
  • Barry Long, Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (Barry Long Books, 1996).

• Look not mournfully into the Past; it comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present; it is thine.
  Go forth to meet the shadowy Future without fear and with a manly heart.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion (1839).

• We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history.
  • Audre Lorde, Learning from the 60s, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press. 1984. ISBN 978-0-89594-142-8. 

(full text online multiple formats)

 

• The subject of the future that lies before humanity may obviously be treated in various ways; perhaps the simplest division which we can make is to speak first of the immediate future, then of the remoter future, then of the final goal. Both the immediate and the remoter future may be to some extent a matter of speculation, or perhaps we should rather say of calculation; but the final goal we know with absolute certainty, and that is the only thing which is really of importance. Still it is well that we should try to look forward a little, so that we who are units in this great mass of humanity may be able to take our part intelligently in the evolution which we see to be progressing all round us.

• The conditions of the near future must naturally develop from those which we see today; and I think that as we look about us, unless we are terribly prejudiced, we must admit that in spite of our boasted civilization there is very much which is highly unsatisfactory. p. 324

• Then the great question of government is also in an unsatisfactorv condition; for I think all will agree that there is no country in the world which is governed, as every country in the world ought to be, solely with regard to the interests and advancement of the people who are governed. On the contrary we find everywhere personal and party considerations, and matters are in such condition that even the wisest and the best of our statesmen cannot do many things which they wish to do, and find themselves forced into many actions of which in truth they do not approve. p. 326

• All of these difficulties arise from ignorance and selfishness. If men understood the plan of evolution, instead of working each for his own personal ends they would all join together as a community and work harmoniously for the good of all with mutual tolerance and forbearance. It is obvious that if this were done all of these evils would almost immediately cease or at any rate could very shortly be removed. p. 326

• Every day a greater number of people are beginning to understand to some extent and to strive towards a better and more rational condition of affairs. There are many societies and associations which have for their object the amelioration of the condition of humanity Some of them begin at one end and some at the other, each approaches it from his own point of view and with his own set of remedies, but at least they are striving towards that development of unselfishness which is the only true solution of all our difficulties.

• Our own Theosophical Society... is striving to help humanity It has no connection with any form of politics, and it is not trying to act directly in any way with regard to social conditions, its effort is rather to dispel ignorance, to put before men the truth about life and death, to show them why they are here and what lessons they have to learn and so to bring them to understand and to realize the great truth of the brotherhood of man.

• Never was there a greater need for the diffusion of knowledge, for in the present ignorance of men there is a very real and imminent danger. We have in the immediate future the possibility of serious struggle; we have all the elements of a possible social upheaval, and we have no religion with sufficient hold upon the people to check what may develop into a wild and dangerous movement.

• As yet philosophy is the study of the very few only, and the science which has done so much for us, and has achieved so many triumphs, cannot stay the danger which threatens us. The only thing that can prevent it is the diffusion of knowledge, so that men shall understand what is really best for them and shall realize that nothing can ever be good for one which is against the interests of the whole. p. 333

• Our religious friends argue much about heaven and hell and are terribly afraid of the latter indeed it would sometimes almost seem as though they were afraid of the former as well, from the manner in which they exert themselves to avoid going there/ In the future no questions or disputes about these conditions will be possible, because man will see for himself that there is no hell, though he will also see very clearly that those who live an evil life are by that fact storing up for themselves very undesirable results and a very unpleasant time in the astral life. The glories of the heaven world will also be open to his sight, and he will realize that man needs only a development of faculty in order to place him at once, here and now, in the midst of all the bliss that that wondrous life can give.

• What a change will come over our conceptions of art and music also for the artist of that day there will be many more colors and many more shades of color than those of which we now know, for the knowledge of the higher planes brings as one of its earliest results the power of appreciating all these different hues. The music of that day will be accompanied by color, just as the color studies will be accompanied by harmonious sound; for sound and color are simply two aspects of every ordered motion, so that a magnificent piece played upon the organ will be accompanied by a splendid display of glowing color, and thus another interest will be added to the delight of glorious music, and an additional advantage will in this way be enjoyed by the students of music and art. p. 344

• A great change too will come over the power side of man’s development; the whole question of government and organization will stand upon a different basis. Men will see then vividly and clearly the effect upon the astral plane of many of their actions upon the physical, and thus much that is now done thoughtlessly will become an absolute impossibility There could be no possibility of the slaughter of animals for food, for example, if only men were able to see the results upon the astral plane which that slaughter produces. The crime which men call sport would be utterly abolished if they were able to see what it is that they are really doing. It needs so slight a development to change the whole face of this which we call civilization, and to change it very much for the better. p. 345

• The future survives because people care. Live responsibly or die.
  • Lisa Mason, The Golden Nineties (1995), ISBN 0-553-57307-1 p. 168

• The first man—the Master—raised his goblet in a mocking toast. “To the future,” he said. “It’s on its way now, whether we’re prepared or not.”
  • Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, (2017, ISBN 978-0-76539-2-039), p. 81

• Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they're designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways.
  • Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008, page 46 (ISBN 9781603580557).

• People have always had this craving to know the future. You know, the king used to hire the magician or the forecaster and he'd look in sheep guts, or something, for an answer as to handle the next war. And so there has always been a market for people who purported to know the future based on their expertise. And there's a lot of that still going on — it's just as crazy as when the king was hiring the forecaster who looked at the sheep guts. And people have an economic incentive to sell some nostrum — it can be sold over and over again.
  • Charlie Munger, (August 2, 2018)"Warren Buffett: 2004 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Part 1". Hioim, YouTube. (quote at 1:47:18 of 2:33:25)

 

• If someone who knew the future, pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives... could you then kill that child?
  • Fourth Doctor, Doctor Who, "Genesis of the Daleks" written by Terry Nation

• "The future," as George Soros, the financier and philanthropist once observed, "is not only unknown: it is unknowable." Given that, it seemed like a good idea to take Neil Postman’s two extremes to see how our networked future might unfold. Which kind of future—the Orwellian or the Huxleyean—seems more plausible? Postman thought that the two were mutually exclusive: humanity might have one or the other. But an even gloomier conclusion is that we might wind up with both.
  • John Naughton in: From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: Disruptive Innovation in the Age of the Internet, Quercus, 2014, Chapter 9, page 231 (ISBN 9781623650629)

• The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future? [...] Nevertheless the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now.
  • Jawaharlal Nehru, Tryst with Destiny speech (August 14, 1947)

• Our immediate task, however, is the critical work of confronting the economic crisis. As I've said, we've passed through an era of profound irresponsibility; now we cannot afford half-measures, and we cannot go back to the kind of risk-taking that leads to bubbles that inevitably bust. So we have a choice. We can shape our future, or let events shape it for us. And if we want to succeed, we can't fall back on the stale debates and old divides that won't move us forward.
  • Barack Obama, Barack Obama: "The President's News Conference With Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom in London, England," April 1, 2009. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.

• Don’t shortchange the future, because of fear in the present.
  • Barack Obama, Barack Obama: "The President's News Conference With Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom in London, England," April 1, 2009. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.

• We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it.
  • Barack Obama, In a speech to joint session of Congress, (September. 9, 2009).

• If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.
  • Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, press conference held at the Grand Central Terminal’s famous Oyster Bar in 1975 in New York City. Source: Angela Serratore (June 26, 2018 ): History: The Preservation Battle of Grand Central. In: Smithsonian Magazine. Archived from the original on January 9, 2023.

• Can omniscient God, who
  Knows the future, find
  The Omnipotence to
  Change His future mind?
  • Karen Owens in: The God Delusion, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Jan 16, 2008, p. 101.

• The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's.
  • Jean Paul, as quoted in Treasury of Thought (1872) by Maturin M. Ballou, p. 521.

• I prefer to look on the future as something which is not written in stone. A lot of things can happen in 25 years.
  • Jean-Luc Picard (played by Patrick Stewart in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "All Good Things..." (23 May 1994) by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore

• The past is written, but the future is left for us to write, and we have powerful tools, Rios: openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity. All they have is secrecy, and fear, and fear is the great destroyer, Rios.
  • Jean-Luc Picard (played by Patrick Stewart in the Star Trek: Picard episode Broken Pieces (March 12, 2020) written by Michael Chabon

• It is by imagining what we truly desire that we begin to go there. That is the kind of thinking about the future that seems to me most fruitful, most rewarding. I want a future in which women are not punished for having women's bodies, are not punished for desire or the lack of it, are viewed as independent protagonists in their own adventures-spiritual, intellectual, romantic, sexual, and creative adventures. That's one reason I read and write speculative fiction.
  • Marge Piercy "WHY SPECULATE ON THE FUTURE?" in My Life, My Body (2015)

• Whenever the rate of return on capital is significantly and durably higher than the growth rate of the economy, it is all but inevitable that inheritance (of fortunes accumulated in the past) predominates over saving (wealth accumulated in the present). ... The inequality r > g in one sense implies that the past tends to devour the future: wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly, even without labor, than wealth stemming from work, which can be saved. Almost inevitably, this tends to give lasting disproportionate importance to inequalities created in the past, and therefore to inheritance.
  • Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), p. 377.

• We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.
  • Max Planck, The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics (1931).

• There’s no better present than a future.
  • Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (1996), p. 168 (ISBN 978-0-06-105905-6)

• The future is much like the present, only longer.
  • Dan Quisenberry, as quoted by Stephen Lilley, Transhumanism and Society : the Social Debate over Human Enhancement (2013) p. 24.

• We must discipline ourselves to convert dreams into plans, and plans into goals, and goals into those small daily activities that will lead us, one sure step at a time, toward a better future.
  • Jim Rohn, Five Major Pieces To the Life Puzzle (1991).

• We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future. Spinoza, I think, pointed out that we ourselves can make experience valuable when, by imagination and reason, we turn it into foresight.
  • Eleanor Roosevelt, Tomorrow Is Now (1963), p. xv

• What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now.
  • Eleanor Roosevelt, Tomorrow Is Now (1963), p. 134

• The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
  • Eleanor Roosevelt, as quoted in Leonard C. Schlup and Donald W. Whisenhunt, It Seems to Me: Selected Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt (2001), p. 2.

• To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt, Remarks at the Dedication of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York, United States of America (June 30, 1941). Archived from the original on January 30, 2021.

• The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1944–45 (1950), p. 616, which states: "This is the latest draft of the President's proposed speech [for Jefferson Day, April 13, 1945]. The last sentence [quoted above] was written into the typed draft in his own hand. The draft was not the final one; the preparation of the final draft was prevented by death."

• Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels... there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought that His second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance, "Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come." Then he says, "There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom"; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed that His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of His earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, "Take no thought for the morrow," and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought that the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe that the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians did really believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In that respect, clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and He was certainly not superlatively wise.
  • Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian (1927), "Defects in Christ's Teaching".

• I am interested in a phase that I think we are entering. I call it "teleological evolution," evolution with a purpose. The idea of evolution by design, designing the future, anticipating the future. I think of the need for more wisdom in the world, to deal with the knowledge that we have. At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge?
  • Jonas Salk, in Academy of Achievement interview, in San Diego, California (16 May 1991)

• If you can look into the seeds of time,
  And say which grain will grow and which will not;
  Speak then to me.
  • William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, Sc. 3, L. 58.

• To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
  • William Shakespeare, Macbeth.

• From now on, everything in life will appear blurry to me. What’s the point of wiping my glasses when my vision has already left me?
  • Sanu Sharma, Pari

• "So you've been over into Russia?" said Bernard Baruch, and I answered very literally, "I have been over into the future and it works."
  • Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931, reprinted 1958), vol. 2, chapter 18, p. 799. Steffens had made his second trip to Russia in 1919, as part of a mission sent by President Woodrow Wilson.

• With the way the world’s going a nuclear Iran is going to be the least of our problems in 10 or 15 years. Iranian nukes will be a break from swimming through our climate-change flooded cities fighting ebola zombies with our teeth because we can’t hold guns thanks to our iPhone-shaped hand tumors.
  • Jon Stewart The Daily Show July 21st 2015

• We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present.
  • Adlai Stevenson, Speech, Richmond, Virginia (20 September 1952).
• ....another vision, where water still curled on the sandy beach beneath a clear blue sky where birds flew, but their patterns were mathematics precise beyond his comprehension. A man walked between buildings that were perfect, and empty. He turned to look at Rudi for an instant and where his eyes should have been were silvery tendrils that waved and sought.
  • S. M. Stirling, The Sword of the Lady

• ...stop haunting your past and try to drop in on the future.
  • Antonio Tabucchi. Pereira Maintains, p. 146.

• This is really odd that economists are expected to predict the future, because no on expect other people in other disciplines to predict the future. Nobody says to the biologists: What is the next stage in evolution? If you can't expect the next stage in evolution... well I guess biology just isn't a science and, that no one should listen to you. Nobody says to the political scientist: Well... you know, who is going to win the next election? If you can't tell me now, then I guess, you know, political science does not mean anything. But somehow economics takes this burden, that people in economics are supposed to be able to forecast the future.
  • Timothy Taylor, in Economics, 3rd Edition (The Great Courses) (2008), Chapter 1: "How Economists Think."

• The future has taken root in the present.
  • Kryptonian spaceship, Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021), Written by Chris Terrio. As quoted in: Adam Chitwood (May 28, 2023): Cyborg’s Vision in ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’ Showed Us What Could've Been in the DCU. In: collider.com. Archived from the original on December 12, 2023.

• Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.
  • Nikola Tesla, On patent controversies regarding the invention of Radio and other things, as quoted in "A Visit to Nikola Tesla" by Dragislav L. Petković in Politika (April 1927); as quoted in Tesla, Master of Lightning (1999) by Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, p. 73 ISBN 0760710058  ; also in Tesla: Man Out of Time (2001) by Margaret Cheney, p. 230 ISBN 0743215362 .

• I have obtained... spark discharges extending through more than one hundred feet and carrying currents of one thousand amperes, electromotive forces approximating twenty million volts, chemically active streamers covering areas of several thousand square feet, and electrical disturbances in the natural media surpassing those caused by lightning, in intensity.
  Whatever the future may bring, the universal application of these great principles is fully assured, though it may be long in coming. With the opening of the first power plant, incredulity will give way to wonderment, and this to ingratitude, as ever before.
  • Nikola Tesla, "The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires as a Means for Furthering Peace" in Electrical World and Engineer (7 January 1905) .

• The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes.
  • Nikola Tesla, "Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World" in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934).

• The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.
  • Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, "Computers, p. 113 (1974)

• Man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock.
  • Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970), Chapter 15.

 

 

• What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife.
  • Nikola Tesla, in My Inventions (1919)

• Hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness.
  • Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now (1997)

• A state of consciousness totally free of all negativity ... is the liberated state to which all spiritual teachings point. It is the promise of salvation, not in an illusory future but right here and now.
  • Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now (1997)

• Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future.
  • Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now (1997)

• The moment your attention turns to the Now, you feel a presence, a stillness, a peace. You no longer depend on the future for fulfillment and satisfaction - you don’t look to it for salvation.
  • Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now (1997)

• Awakening as a future event has no meaning because awakening is the realization of Presence. So the new heaven, the awakened consciousness, is not a future state to be achieved. A new heaven and a new earth are arising within you at this moment, and if they are not arising at this moment, they are no more than a thought in your head and therefore not arising at all.
  • Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, (2005)

• Be it even over our bleaching bones the truth will triumph! We will blaze the trail for it. It will conquer! Under all the severe blows of fate, I shall be happy as in the best days of my youth! Because, my friends, the highest human happiness is not the exploitation of the present but the preparation of the future.
  • Leon Trotsky, 'I Stake My Life', opening telephone address to the N.Y. Hippodrome Meeting for the opening event of the Dewey Commission on the Moscow Trial (February 9, 1937)

• Trust no future, howe'er pleasant!
  Let the dead Past bury its dead!
  Act, act in the living present!
  Heart within, and God o'erhead!
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life (1839), St. 6.

• "The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present"
  • Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes (1985)

• The nation is burdened with the heavy curse on those who come afterwards. The generation before us was inspired by an activism and a naive enthusiasm, which we cannot rekindle, because we confront tasks of a different kind from those which our fathers faced.
  • Max Weber, address to convention of the Verein für Socialpolitik, Germany, 1893; reported in Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber (1960), p. 53.

• You can't fuck the future. The future fucks you! It catches up with you and it fucks you if you ain't planned for it!
  • Norman Wexler, through the main character Tony Manero in the motion picture Saturday Night Fever (1978).

• My visions of the future are always pretty much standard issue. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer... and there are flying cars.
  • Joss Whedon TV Guide (27 December – 2 January 2004), and Foreword to Fray

• It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.
  • Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 13: Requisites for Social Progress.

• My clients are the children; my clients are the next generation. They do not know what promises and bonds I undertook when I ordered the armies of the United States to the soil of France, but I know, and I intend to redeem my pledges to the children; they shall not be sent upon a similar errand.
  • Woodrow Wilson, address in Pueblo, Colorado (September 25, 1919); reported in Albert Shaw, ed., The Messages and Papers of Woodrow Wilson (1924), vol. 2, p. 1127.

• Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights. It is the means to help our children and our people rediscover their identity and thereby increase their self respect. Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs only to the people who prepare for it today.
  • Malcolm X, Speech at Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (28 June 1964), as quoted in By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter (1970).

• Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.
  • Malcolm X, Speech at Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (28 June 1964), as quoted in By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter (1970).

• To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
  • Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, p. 270.

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 304-06.

• That what will come, and must come, shall come well.
  • Edwin Arnold, Light of Asia (1879), Book VI, line 274.

• Making all futures fruits of all the pasts.
  • Edwin Arnold, Light of Asia (1879), Book V, line 432.

• Some day Love shall claim his own
  Some day Right ascend his throne,
  Some day hidden Truth be known;
  Some day—some sweet day.
  • Lewis J. Bates, Some Sweet Day.

• The year goes wrong, and tares grow strong,
  Hope starves without a crumb;
  But God's time is our harvest time,
  And that is sure to come.
  • Lewis J. Bates, Our Better Day.

• Dear Land to which Desire forever flees;
  Time doth no present to our grasp allow,
  Say in the fixed Eternal shall we seize
  At last the fleeting Now?
  • Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Corn Flowers, Book I. The First Violets.

• You can never plan the future by the past.
  • Edmund Burke, letter to a Member of the National Assembly, Volume IV, p. 55.

• With mortal crisis doth portend,
  My days to appropinque an end.
  • Samuel Butler, Hudibras (1664), Part I, Canto III, line 589.

• 'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore,
  And coming events cast their shadows before.
  • Thomas Campbell, Lochiel's Warning.

• Certis rebus certa signa præcurrunt.
  • Certain signs precede certain events.
  • Cicero, De Divinatione, I. 52.

• So often do the spirits
  Of great events stride on before the events,
  And in to-day already walks to-morrow.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Death of Wallenstein, Act V, scene 1.

• There shall be no more snow
  No weary noontide heat,
  So we lift our trusting eyes
  From the hills our Fathers trod:
  To the quiet of the skies:
  To the Sabbath of our God.
  • Felicia Hemans, Evening Song of the Tyrolese Peasants.

• Quid sit futurum cras, fuge quærere: et

Quem Fors dierum cunque dabit, lucro
Appone.

• • Cease to inquire what the future has in store, and to take as a gift whatever the day brings forth.
  • Horace, Carmina, I. 9. 13.

• Prudens futuri temporis exitum
  Caliginosa nocte premit deus.
  • A wise God shrouds the future in obscure darkness.
  • Horace, Carmina, III. 29. 29.

• You'll see that, since our fate is ruled by chance,
  Each man, unknowing, great,
  Should frame life so that at some future hour
  Fact and his dreamings meet.
  • Victor Hugo, To His Orphan Grandchildren.

• With whom there is no place of toil, no burning heat, no piercing cold, nor any briars there … this place we call the Bosom of Abraham.
  • Josephus, Discourse to the Greeks concerning Hades. Homer, Odyssey, VI. 42.

• When Earth's last picture is painted, and the tubes are twisted and dried,
  When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
  We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it—lie down for an æon or two,
  Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall set us to work anew.
  • Rudyard Kipling, When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted.

• Le présent est gros de l'avenir.
  • The present is big with the future.
  • Leibnitz.

• Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
  Let the dead Past bury its dead!
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life.

• There's a good time coming, boys;
  A good time coming:
  We may not live to see the day,
  But earth shall glisten in the ray
  Of the good time coming.
  Cannon-balls may aid the truth,
  But thought's a weapon stronger;
  We'll win our battle by its aid,
  Wait a little longer.
  • Charles Mackay, The Good Time Coming.

• The future is a world limited by ourselves; in it we discover only what concerns us and, sometimes, by chance, what interests those whom we love the most.
  • Maurice Maeterlinck, Joyzelle, Act I.

• Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
  • Matthew, VI. 34.

• The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.
  • Anne Morrow Lindbergh, The Wave of the Future (1940).

• The never-ending flight
  Of future days.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book II, line 221.

• There was the Door to which I found no key;
  There was the Veil through which I might not see.
  • Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1120), Stanza 32. (Later ed.) FitzGerald's translation.

• Venator sequitur fugientia; capta relinquit;
  Semper et inventis ulteriora petit.
  • The hunter follows things which flee from him; he leaves them when they are taken; and ever seeks for that which is beyond what he has found.
  • Ovid, Amorum (16 BC), Book II. 9. 9.

• Ludit in humanis divina potentia rebus,
  Et certam præsens vix habet hora fidem.
  • Heaven makes sport of human affairs, and the present hour gives no sure promise of the next.
  • Ovid, Epistolæ Ex Ponto, IV. 3. 49.

• Nos duo turba sumus.
  • We two [Deucalion and Pyrrha, after the deluge] form a multitude.
  • Ovid, Metamorphoses, I. 355.

• Après nous le déluge.
  • After us the deluge.
  • Mme. Pompadour. After the battle of Rossbach. See Larousse, Fleurs Historiques. Madame de Hausset, Memoirs. (Ed. 1824), p. 19. Also attributed to Louis XV by the French. Compare Cicero, De Finibus, XI. 16.

• Oh, blindness to the future! kindly giv'n,
  That each may fill the circle mark'd by heaven.
  • Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733-34), Epistle I, line 85.

• In adamantine chains shall Death be bound,
  And Hell's grim tyrant feel th' eternal wound.
  • Alexander Pope, Messiah, line 47.

• And better skilled in dark events to come.
  • Alexander Pope, The Odyssey, Book V. 219.

• Etwas fürchten und hoffen und sorgen,
  Muss der Mensch für den kommenden Morgen.
  • Man must have some fears, hopes, and cares, for the coming morrow.
  • Friedrich Schiller, Die Braut von Messina.

• But there's a gude time coming.
  • Walter Scott, Rob Roy, Chapter XXXII.

• Calamitosus est animus futuri anxius.
  • The mind that is anxious about the future is miserable.
  • Seneca the Younger, Epistolæ Ad Lucilium, XCVIII.

• How many ages hence
  Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
  In states unborn and accents yet unknown.
  • William Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar (1599), Act III, scene 1, line 111.

• God, if Thy will be so,
  Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
  With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!
  • William Shakespeare, Richard III (c. 1591), Act V, scene 5, line 32.

• Quid crastina volveret ætas,
  Scire nefas homini.
  • Man is not allowed to know what will happen to-morrow.
  • Statius, Thebais, III. 562.

• Could we but know
  The land that ends our dark, uncertain travel.
  • Edmund Clarence Stedman, Undiscovered Country.

• When the Rudyards cease from Kipling
  And the Haggards ride no more.
  • J. K. Stephen, Lapsus Calami.

• When I am dead let the earth be dissolved in fire.
  • Suetonius. Quoting Nero. Nero. 38. Quoted by Milton from Tiberius in his Church Government, Book I, Chapter V. Tiberius, quoting an unknown Greek poet. See note of Leutsch, Appendix II. 56, to Proverbs LVIII. 23. Euripides, Fragment Inc. B, XXVII.

• Till the sun grows cold,
  And the stars are old,
  And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold.
  • Bayard Taylor, Bedouin Song.

• Istuc est sapere, non quod ante pedes modo est
  Videre, sed etiam illa, quæ futura sunt
  Prospicere.
  • That is to be wise to see not merely that which lies before your feet, but to foresee even those things which are in the womb of futurity.
  • Terence, Adelphi, III. 3. 32.

• I hear a voice you cannot hear,
  Which says, I must not stay;
  I see a hand you cannot see,
  Which beckons me away.
  • Thomas Tickell, Colin and Lucy.

• Dabit deus his quoque finem.
  • God will put an end to these also.
  • Virgil, Æneid (29-19 BC), I. 199.