quotations about the future
The future is not an inheritance, it is an opportunity and an obligation.
BILL CLINTON
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
The future ain't what it used to be.
YOGI BERRA
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
The future was a time that called into question everything that came before it.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark
The future? I hate it because I will not be there.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
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
This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
attributed, The Peter Plan: A Proposal for Survival
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
The future will soon be a thing of the past.
GEORGE CARLIN
Napalm and Silly Putty
The future is still unspoiled.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
A Long Fatal Love Chase
He only is anxious about the future, to whom the present is unprofitable.
SENECA
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's.
JEAN PAUL
Treasury of Thought
Coming events cast their shadows before.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
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
The best is always yet to come.
BOB DYLAN
"If Dogs Run Free"
Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
AYN RAND
The Romantic Manifesto
Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.
TRACY LETTS
August: Osage Country
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 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