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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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Most quoted on future:

There is life after the left. And there is anarchy after anarchism. Post-leftist anarchists are striking off in many directions. Some may find the way — better yet, the ways — to a free future.

Bob Black Anarchy after Leftism (1997)

The future might have been crammed with miracles and wonders, but it also offered truly awesome opportunities for screwing up.

Alastair Reynolds Century Rain (2004)

The glories and obstacles of the past are just a speck compared to the vastness of the future.

Liu Cixin A View from the Stars (2024)

The future is more beautiful than all the pasts.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises.

Steven Erikson House of Chains (2002)

Future leaders will be less concerned with saying what they will deliver and more concerned with delivering what they have said they would.

Dave Ulrich David Ulrich cited in: Stephen Covey (2006)

The future is never written...only penciled in.

Dan Simmons Endymion (1996)

I feel that the more I discuss the future with you, the more discouraged I become.

Kelley Armstrong The Poisoner's Ring (2023)

The past is to be respected and acknowledged, but not to be worshipped. It is our future in which we will find our greatness.

Pierre Trudeau

A revolution is not a trail of roses.... A revolution is a fight to the death between the future and the past.

Fidel Castro

When I envision the future, I think of the world I crave for my daughters and my sons. It is thinking for survival of the species — thinking for life.

Audre Lorde Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

Time past was nothing, no matter how long. Time ahead was everything, no matter how brief.

Sheri S. Tepper Grass (1989)

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 The Peter Plan : A Proposal for Survival (1976)

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

Stephen Spender Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Times (1993)

Oh, Sirin, how could you? You know as well as I do how dangerous scrying the future can be. Half the time what it shows you wouldn’t happen if you hadn’t foreseen it.

Michael Swanwick The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993)

Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion (1912)

Neither a wise man or a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Science is art. It is the process of creating something that never exists before. ... It makes us ask new questions about ourselves, others; about ethics, the future.

Regina E. Dugan

Isn't the future necessarily going to be dominated by machine life?

Steven Novella

The future was not what it used to be.

K. A. Bedford Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait (2008)

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