Quotes about the future

What Is, is, what Was, was, but what is To Be, may be otherwise.

What happens in our future can change the meaning of what has happened in our past.

Fear requires a desire to exist in the future.

I emphasize the exponential-versus-linear perspective because it's the most important failure that prognosticators make in considering future trends. Most technology forecasts and forecasters ignore altogether this historical exponential view of technological progress. Indeed, almost everyone I meet has a linear view of the future. That's why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out unnecessary details) but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because exponential growth is ignored).

Exponential growth is seductive, starting out slowly and virtually unnoticeably, but beyond the knee of the curve it turns explosive and profoundly transformative. The future is widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected it to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past. Exponential trends did exist one thousand years ago, but they were at that very early stage in which they were so flat and so slow that they looked like no trend at all. As a result, observers’ expectation of an unchanged future was fulfilled. Today, we anticipate continuous technological progress and the social repercussions that follow. But the future will be far more surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.

We have known about the dangers we pose to ourselves for decades and yet we continue sleepwalking toward a grim future, somehow numb to what it will mean for our children and theirs. Almost every depiction of our world's future in popular culture is a dystopian vision of a planet piled high with garbage, a ruined wasteland. They are accurate reflections of the fear in our hearts. But if dreams are maps, could a great dream of our future possibly help us find our way out of this nightmare?

The past has lost, as it always loses; the future has won, as it always wins.

The past was gone, after all, and the future was the only thing they had left.

She'd always believed that people come in two varieties: those who look out the windshield and those who stare in the rearview mirror. She'd always been the windshield type: Gotta focus on the future, not the past, because that's the only part that's still up for grabs.

Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values.

Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.

Tomorrow's trials concerned her more than yesterday's triumphs.