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
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
We are all engaged in looting the past. (Only the greatest geniuses manage to steal from the future.)
DONALD BARTHELME
"The Emerging Figure"
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
AYN RAND
The Romantic Manifesto
The best way to predict your future is to create it.
ROBERT ANTHONY
Think Big
Perhaps the safest prediction we can make about the future is that it will surprise us.
GEORGE LEONARD
The Silent Pulse
The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.
BILL WATTERSON
Calvin and Hobbes
The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized. We belong to a "great age" that has not "come off". We moved too quickly for the world. We set too sharp a pace.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Blasting and Bombardiering
The future is an infinite succession of presents.
HOWARD ZINN
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
Man is better without knowledge of things to come, for what is to be will be, and man can neither avert nor hasten. It is better to go in the dark when the road must pass a lion and there is no other road.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
Kull: Exile of Atlantis
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
The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
You can never plan the future by the past.
EDMUND BURKE
letter to a Member of the National Assembly
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
It is impossible for you to take power over the future because it isn't even real.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
The Shack
There is no future until we settle our past.
ALEXA DAVALOS
The Chronicles of Riddick
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Creation and P. H. Gosse," Other Inquisitions