The future

François-René de Chateaubriand (in Mémoires d'outre-tombe) - Le ciel fait rarement naître ensemble l’homme qui veut et l’homme qui peut.

Justin Fox - The wolf usually shows up right around the time that those who have been crying wolf for years have been utterly discredited. Have we reached that point yet?

Christopher Freiman - “Life is getting worse” : right-wingers who mythologize the past [and] left-wingers who can’t accept that capitalism relentlessly improves our standard of living.

Nathaniel Friedman - Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.

Robert Frost - In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

William Gibson (1999) - The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed yet.

William Gibson (2012) - Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

Michel Godet - Un monde certain est un monde mort.

Michel Godet - Agir pour se préparer au changement attendu mais il y a des mirages collectifs - le Japon, la Netéconomie, le Développement Durable.

Robert A. Heinlein - Logic is a feeble reed, friend. “Logic” proved that airplanes can’t fly and that H-bombs won’t work and that stones don’t fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn’t happen yesterday won’t happen tomorrow.

Frank Herbert - The function of sci-fi is not to predict the future, but to prevent it.

Karl Jaspers - Succumb neither to the past nor to the future. It is important to be completely in the present (German original: Weder dem Vergangenen anheimfallen noch dem Zukünftigen. Es kommt darauf an, ganz gegenwärtig zu sein.)

Daniel Kahneman (in Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011) - The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

David Karpf (2022) - Bluntly put, we are going to inhabit the future that offers the most significant returns to investors.

Lord Kelvin (1895) - Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

Tom Lehrer - Always predict the worst, and you'll be hailed as a Prophet.

Friedrich Nietzsche (in Ecce Homo) - It is not doubt but certainty that drives you mad... (German original: Nicht der Zweifel, die Gewissheit ist das, was wahnsinnig macht…)

Blaise Pascal - Qu’on s’imagine un nombre d’hommes dans les chaînes, et tous condamnés à la mort, dont les uns étant chaque jour égorgés à la vue des autres, ceux qui restent voient leur propre condition dans celle de leurs semblables, et, se regardant les uns les autres avec douleur et sans espérance, attendent leur tour : c’est l’image de la condition des hommes.

Jacques Prévert (in Drôle de drame, 1937) - A force d’écrire des choses horribles, les choses horribles finissent par arriver.

Steven Pinker (in How the mind works, 1997) - The one prediction coming out of futurology that is undoubtedly correct is that in the future today's futurologists will look silly.

Jules Renard - Une fois que ma décision est prise, j'hésite longuement.

Jon Stewart - I have complete faith in the continued absurdity of whatever's going on.

Miguel de Unamuno - Let us endeavour to be the parents of our future rather than the children of our past. (Spanish original: Procuremos más ser padres de nuestro porvenir que hijos de nuestro pasado.)

Edward M. Weyer Jr (Anthropologist) - The future is like a corridor into which we can see only by the light coming from behind.

Yiddish proverb - Der mentsh trakht und Got lakht. (English: Man plans and God laughs.)