quotations about the future
It is today that we must create the world of the future.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Tomorrow Is Now
The future is still unspoiled.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
A Long Fatal Love Chase
Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.
TRACY LETTS
August: Osage Country
God, in His great and infinite widsom, never intended that we should see into futurity, for had He gifted us with the power, it would have led to numberless cases of self-destruction. Who, that has gone through trials and troubles without number, in his weary journey and pilgrimage through this world of trial and woe, had he seen these trials and troubles in the bright and sunny days of his youth, could have lived to face them? Not one in a hundred. What mother, when gazing over her first born infant with pride, rapture, and delight beaming through the windows of her soul, could have believed that that child of hers would one day shut the door on her; or that he would stagger home, a rogue, liar, and confirmed drunkard? What blushing bride, leaving the altar with the husband of her choice, the man who has sworn before God to protect her, would believe that that arm she is then leaning on to support a heart loaded with love and joy, would, ere long, disgrace the manhood of its owner, and fell her to the ground? For our present peace, let us all thank God we cannot gaze into the mysterious regions of the future.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
Short Essays
The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.
ANITA BROOKNER
Lewis Percy
The future will soon be a thing of the past.
GEORGE CARLIN
Napalm and Silly Putty
We're not responsible for the world we're born into. Only for the world we leave when we die. So we have to accept what's gone before us in the past, and work to change the only thing we can--the future.
WILLIAM SHATNER
The Ashes of Eden
Perhaps the safest prediction we can make about the future is that it will surprise us.
GEORGE LEONARD
The Silent Pulse
The future is not an inheritance, it is an opportunity and an obligation.
BILL CLINTON
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
EUGENE O'NEILL
A Moon for the Misbegotten
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
The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.
BILL WATTERSON
Calvin and Hobbes
Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Hyperion
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
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
Tomorrow will be a new day.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
AYN RAND
The Romantic Manifesto
What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
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