quotations about the future
The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Fresh Air, Aug. 31, 1993
A fortune-teller may inform you, having pocketed your two guineas, that a rich uncle in Australia is going to leave you a million pounds next year. She doesn't promise you the million pounds herself; obviously that is coming to you anyhow, fortune-teller or no fortune-teller. There is no suggestion on her part that she is arranging your future for you. All that she promises to do for two guineas is to give you a little advance information. She tells you that you are coming into a million pounds next year, and if you believe it, I should say that it was well worth the money. You have a year's happiness (if that sort of thing makes you happy), a year in which to tell yourself in every trouble, "Never mind, there's a good time coming"; a year in which to make glorious plans for the future, to build castles in the air, or (if your taste is not for castles) country cottages and Mayfair flats. And all this for two guineas; it is amazingly cheap.
A. A. MILNE
If I May
A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
"My Future Plans,", The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein
Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
NEIL GAIMAN
foreword, The Stars My Destination
Well the future for me is already a thing of the past.
BOB DYLAN
"Bye and Bye"
A wise man would ignore the future and drink and carouse while he still has an opportunity to enjoy this world.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Brisingr
Of the future, man knows least; yet, about this, he worries most.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
The future must be met, however stern and iron it be.
ELIZABETH GASKELL
North and South
There is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Tomorrow may never come to us. We do not live in tomorrow. We cannot find it in any of our title-deeds. The man who owns whole blocks of real estate, and great ships on the sea, does not own a single minute of tomorrow. Tomorrow! It is a mysterious possibility, not yet born. It lies under the seal of midnight--behind the veil of glittering constellations.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.
DENNIS GABOR
Inventing the Future
The story of the future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same thing that shall be.
LORD ACTON
The History of Freedom in Christianity
You don't need to predict the future. Just choose a future -- a good future, a useful future -- and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
One might as well attempt to calculate mathematically the contingent forms of the tinkling bits of glass in a kaleidoscope as to look through the tube of the future and foretell its pattern.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
EMIL CIORAN
History & Utopia
People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it.
RAY BRADBURY
Beyond 1984: The People Machines
You glorify the past
When the future dries up.
U2
"God Part II"
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
foreword, Fray
While we may open the books of the past, we may but grant flying glances of the future, through the mist that veils it.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
Kull: Exile of Atlantis
To ordain the future in advance in this way, man must first have learned to distinguish necessary events from chance ones, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it, and in general be able to calculate and compute.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Genealogy of Morals