quotations about the future
It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
Science and the Modern World
People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
GEORGE ORWELL
Partisan Review, Winter 1945
The future was a time that called into question everything that came before it.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
Total self-confidence is built through positive expectations. You can build positive expectations by knowing that you have the power within to overcome any obstacle that lies ahead. So many people have a magnetic attraction to the past. They save momentos, clippings, old letters, and trivia. There is nothing wrong with this, but if you want to succeed, your mind must focus on where you are going, not on where you have been. Instead of saving momentos, clippings, old letters, and trivia from the past, it would be more productive to make a scrapbook with pictures of where you want to go and what you want to be in the future.
ROBERT ANTHONY
The Ultimate Secrets of Total Self-Confidence
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
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
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
The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's.
JEAN PAUL
Treasury of Thought
The future ain't what it used to be.
YOGI BERRA
He only is anxious about the future, to whom the present is unprofitable.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
The greatest adventure is what lies ahead.
Today and tomorrow are yet to be said.
The chances, the changes are all yours to make.
The mold of your life is in your hands to break.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Hobbit
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
It is today that we must create the world of the future.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Tomorrow Is Now
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
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
The future? I hate it because I will not be there.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it.
BARACK OBAMA
speech to joint session of Congress, sep. 9, 2009
Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.
TRACY LETTS
August: Osage Country
We are always looking into the future, but we see only the past.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles," The Writings of Madame Swetchine
The future is still unspoiled.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
A Long Fatal Love Chase