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Future Quotes

John F. Kennedy leads, then Buckminster Fuller, Eckhart Tolle, Shakespeare and Nikola Tesla. Two of Churchill’s lines in The Second World War are here: if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future, and the empires of the future are the empires of the mind. Fuller, in Critical Path (1981), warns that all of humanity is in peril of extinction unless each of us dares to tell only the truth.

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” is credited to Niels Bohr and disputed. The notes also name the Danish poet Piet Hein and the cartoonist Storm P., and they cite an investigation that found its earliest version in 1948. “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams” is credited to Eleanor Roosevelt and is also disputed.

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That is to be wise to see not merely that which lies before your feet, but to foresee even those things which are in the womb of futurity.

Terence

I hear a voice you cannot hear,
Which says I must not stay;
I see a hand you cannot see,
Which beckons me away.

Thomas Tickell

Lawrence Bragg, a shrewd observer of the birth of quantum mechanics, summed up the situation in a few words: "Everything in the future is a wave — everything in the past is a particle."

Freeman Dyson

We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.

John F. Kennedy

So often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in to-day already walks to-morrow.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In adamantine chains shall Death be bound,
And Hell's grim tyrant feel th' eternal wound.

Alexander Pope

The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up...His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.

Nikola Tesla

Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights. It is the means to help our children and our people rediscover their identity and thereby increase their self respect. Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs only to the people who prepare for it today.

Malcolm X By Any Means Necessary (1970)

The future is mysterious. Now we’re seeing an entire generation lost to war. My hopes for the future are not personal; they’re for my people. My hopes are for peace, and only for peace.

Hani Abbas Interview (2013)

Could we but know
The land that ends our dark, uncertain travel.

Edmund Clarence Stedman

Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold.

Bayard Taylor

We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward cross the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

Winston Churchill

We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it.

Barack Obama

We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future. Spinoza, I think, pointed out that we ourselves can make experience valuable when, by imagination and reason, we turn it into foresight.

Eleanor Roosevelt Tomorrow Is Now (1963)

If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.

Hazel Henderson The Politics of the Solar Age (1981)

All previous revolutions have been political—in them the have-not majority has attempted revengefully to pull down the economically advantaged minority. If realized, this historically greatest design revolution will joyously elevate all humanity to unprecedented heights.

Buckminster Fuller Critical Path (1981)

When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it—lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew!

Rudyard Kipling The Seven Seas (1896)

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.

Gabriela Sabatini

Dear Land to which Desire forever flees;
Time doth no present to our grasp allow,
Say in the fixed Eternal shall we seize
At last the fleeting Now?

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

Alan Kay

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