quotations about the future
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
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
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
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
Meditations
He only is anxious about the future, to whom the present is unprofitable.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
The future is not an inheritance, it is an opportunity and an obligation.
BILL CLINTON
Coming events cast their shadows before.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
It is today that we must create the world of the future.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Tomorrow Is Now
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 future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
It Seems to Me: Selected Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt
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
Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.... You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
JOHN GREEN
Looking for Alaska
I go to scale the Future's possibilities! Farewell!
HENRIK IBSEN
Love's Comedy
There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Second Sex
The future will soon be a thing of the past.
GEORGE CARLIN
Napalm and Silly Putty
Tomorrow will be a new day.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Perhaps the safest prediction we can make about the future is that it will surprise us.
GEORGE LEONARD
The Silent Pulse
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
Mabeth
The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.
BILL WATTERSON
Calvin and Hobbes
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"