Quotes about the future

As police you can live with the violence, the squalor and the stupidity—it’s the waste of people’s futures that really grinds you down.

Hope is the lies we tell ourselves about the future.

“There may be such a thing as human destiny,” Newton said, “but I rather imagine it resembles passenger-pigeon destiny.”

I thought of the distant future and the things we’d have, and discounted my wildest guesses as inadequate. Immortality? Achieved in the nineteenth millennium X.R. and discarded in the twenty-third because it was no longer necessary. Reverse entropy to rewind the universe? Obsolete with the discovery of nolanism and the concurrent cognate in the quadrate decal. Sounds wild? How would the word quantum or the concept of a matter-energy transformation sound to a Neanderthaler? We’re Neanderthalers, to our descendants of a hundred thousand years from now. You’ll sell them short to make the wildest guess as to what they’ll do and what they’ll be.

The stars? Hell, yes. They’ll have the stars.

I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future.

Although there are those among us now who have been granted the gift of being able to glimpse patterns of the future, probabilities tossed like dice on the uneven blanket of space and time, even these gifted ones know that no single future has been preordained for us or our posterity. Events are fluid. The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.

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

What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.

Tomorrow would be better. Tomorrow was always better, for someone. The difficult task lay in ensuring that the someone was one of yours.

The Great Western Disease is that we fixate on the future at the expense of enjoying the life we're living now.

The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation. ... Both are illusions.

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