quotations about the future
In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
It is not the present which unfluences the future, thou fool, but the future which forms the present. You have it all backward. Since the future is set, an unfolding of events which will assure that future is fixed and inevitable.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
The future is not an inheritance, it is an opportunity and an obligation.
BILL CLINTON
The best is always yet to come.
BOB DYLAN
"If Dogs Run Free"
There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Zombie
The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's.
JEAN PAUL
Treasury of Thought
This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
attributed, The Peter Plan: A Proposal for Survival
Rational behavior ... depends upon a ceaseless flow of data from the environment. It depends upon the power of the individual to predict, with at least a fair success, the outcome of his own actions. To do this, he must be able to predict how the environment will respond to his acts. Sanity, itself, thus hinges on man's ability to predict his immediate, personal future on the basis of information fed him by the environment.
ALVIN TOFFLER
Future Shock
The future ain't what it used to be.
YOGI BERRA
Whether we shape the future in the image of our hopes, is ours to determine by our actions and our choices.
RICHARD NIXON
Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1969
We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Pattern Recognition
The future will soon be a thing of the past.
GEORGE CARLIN
Napalm and Silly Putty
You can't see the future, there's no such thing. It's all bets. You'll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn't mean either of them's wrong.
CHINA MIéVILLE
Kraken
Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Hyperion
Tomorrow gives a beck'ning hand--
I turn my face away;
I'll not invite her to my home--
I only love Today.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Today"
We are all engaged in looting the past. (Only the greatest geniuses manage to steal from the future.)
DONALD BARTHELME
"The Emerging Figure"
The future was a time that called into question everything that came before it.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
He only is anxious about the future, to whom the present is unprofitable.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
AYN RAND
The Romantic Manifesto
Learn to recognize the future the way a Steersman identifies guiding stars and corrects the course of his vessel. Learn from the past; never use it as an anchor.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen