Future Quotes

I stole their future from them, I can only being to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.

~ Orson Scott Card

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

~ Oscar Wilde

I was not predicting the future, I was trying to prevent it.

~ Ray Bradbury

The young should not think of themselves as immature and the elderly need not view themselves as feeble. Our minds control our bodies. Have no age, transcend both past and future, and enter into naka-ima—the “eternal present.

~ H.e. Davey

If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

By keeping the mind in the present, unless you deliberately want to contemplate the past or future, it’s possible to firmly face life without fear. Then, no thoughts of past failures or future problems will exist in the mind, and a truly positive mental state will result—fudoshin, the “immovable mind.

~ H.e. Davey

I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.

~ Muhammad Yunus

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

~ Blaise Pascal

There were seven men, but just one language. They also moved as one and ate one meal a day and slept in the same bed and knew the same women with whom they'd made the same child. They worked for the same firm as the father. They were the future.

~ Blake Butler

How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.

~ Sebastian Faulks

Since the future's so iffy, I'll turn my attention to the past.

~ Manil Suri

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

The tribe often thinks the visionary has turned his back on them. When, in fact, the visionary has simply turned his face to the future.

~ Ray A. Davis

The past, present, and future, were all equally in gloom.

~ Jane Austen

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

~ Terry Eagleton

This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe

~ Jimmy Carter

It wasn't what lay at the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road itself. No milestones marked its progress. No trees grew along it. No dappled shadows shaded it. No mists rolled over it. No birds circled it. No twists, no turns or hairpin bends obscured even momentarily, her clear view of the end. This filled Ammu with an awful dread, because she was not the kind of woman who wanted her future told. She dreaded it too much. So if she were granted one small wish perhaps it would have been Not to Know, Not to know what each day had in store for her. Not to know where she might be, next month, next year. Ten years on. Not to know which way her road might turn and what lay beyond the bend.

~ Arundhati Roy

Why does every road eventually narrow into a point at the horizon? Because that's where the point lies.

~ Vera Nazarian

The future is like a corridor into which we can see only by the light coming from behind.

~ Edward Weyer Jr.

Imagination sees the complete reality, - it is where past, present and future meet... Imagination is limited neither to the reality which is apparent - nor to one place. It lives everywhere. It is at a centre and feels the vibrations of all the circles within which east and west are virtually included. Imagination is the life of mental freedom. It realizes what everything is in its many aspects ... Imagination does not uplift: we don't want to be uplifted, we want to be more completely aware.

~ Kahlil Gibran

The past is bound to be fragmentary, bound to be reconstructed, bound to be reinvented. It serves only to collect the truths of today. If our present is the child of the past, our past is the child of the present. And the future will be the harvester of our bastard offspring.

~ Amin Maalouf

So much American science fiction is parochial -- not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way...

~ Poul Anderson

Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think - the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered? The Martian was silent, but then he looked ahead. But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say.

~ Ray Bradbury

Hard times are a-coming, and people without useful, practical skills are going to suffer. Or suffer most.

~ Edward Abbey

I'd like to see North America become a dry, sunny, sandy region inhabited mainly by lizards, buzzards and a modest human population - about 25 million would be plenty - of pastoralists and prospectors (prospecting for truth), gathering once a year in the ruins of ancient, mysterious cities for great ceremonies of music, art, dance, poetry, joy, faith and renewal. That's my dream of the American future. Like most such dreams, it will probably come true. That is why I'm still an optimist.

~ Edward Abbey

Provide for her Future—if you can!—That's my motto!—But a man's just a plain bum who don't provide for his own Past!

~ Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

I believe that the military-industrial state will eventually collapse, possibly even in our lifetime, and that a majority of us (if prepared) will muddle through to a freer, more open, less crowded, green and spacious agrarian society. (Maybe; of course it may be only a repeat of the middle ages.)

~ Edward Abbey

The future offers everything. Reach out and take whatever you want.

~ Rosie Thomas

In his mind, Inman likened the swirling paths of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the random ways things fall against each other. It was simple enough to tell fortunes if a man dedicated himself to the idea that the future will inevitably be worse than the past and that time is a path leading nowhere but a place of deep and persistent threat. The way Inman saw it, if a thing like Fredericksburg was to be used as a marker of current position, then many years hence, at the rate we're going, we'll be eating one another raw.

~ Charles Frazier

Ideas define us, our past, our present, and most importantly, our future.

~ P.w. Cross

...[Y]ou cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past.

~ Jan Struther

Is it a fact – or have I dreamt it – that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

~ Roy Amara

You're about to enter the future gate.Come in now, or later will be too late.

~ Toba Beta

We debate sometimes what is to be the future of this nation when we think that in a few years public affairs may be in the hands of the fin-de-siecle gilded youths we see about us during the Christmas holidays. Such foppery, such luxury, such insolence,was surely never practiced by the scented, overbearing patricians of the Palatine, even in Rome's most decadent epoch. In all the wild orgy of wastefulness and luxury with which the nineteenth century reaches its close, the gilded youth has been surely the worst symptom.

~ Booth Tarkington

Serena has spent her life fighting fiction the way good soldiers fight—intent on detecting its presence, harassing it, suppressing it—but I have to find a way to show her she’s mistaken her enemy, to explain to her that whoever suppresses fiction destroys life, and that everything disappears with it, all love, all desire. If the past is an invention, it’s not such a big deal. After all, the future’s an invention, and no one finds that hard to accept.

~ Enrique De Hériz

General..behold the future of weaponry.What the hell I am seeing here, Colonel?It's..technologart of ancient weaponry, Sir!It's..what?

~ Toba Beta

To be ignorant of the future is a condition of mortal existence, with which one can make terms. To be ignorant of the present, where it concerns the life of those one loves, is an additional burden almost beyond endurance.

~ Frances J. Woodward

In the future, eyeglasses see all directions simultaneously.To be able to use hemiscope, eyes and brain need to practice.

~ Toba Beta