Time

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

"Istuc est sapere, non quod ante pedes modo est Videre, sed etiam illa, quæ futura sunt Prospicere."

"Dabit deus his quoque finem."

"Oogway: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the "present"."

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

"Quid crastina volveret ætas, Scire nefas homini."

"When the Rudyards cease from Kipling And the Haggards ride no more."

"When I am dead let the earth be dissolved in fire."

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

"Many religions speak of the End of Days. It refers not to the end of the world, but rather the end of our current age – Pisces, which began at the time of Christ’s birth, spanned two thousand years, and waned with the passing of the millennium. Now that we’ve passed into the Age of Aquarius, the End of Days has arrived."

"Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future."

"We believe in trying to stick with businesses ... where we think we can see the future reasonably well."

"People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better."

"Die Zukunft wird nicht gemeistert von denen, die am Vergangenen kleben."

"You can never plan the future by the past."

"Captain James T. Kirk: If change is inevitable, predictable, beneficial, doesn't logic demand that you be a part of it?"

"Mirror Spock: One man cannot summon the future."

"I come before you and assume the Presidency at a moment rich with promise. We live in a peaceful, prosperous time, but we can make it better. For a new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree. A new breeze is blowing, and a nation refreshed by freedom stands ready to push on. There is new ground to be broken, and new action to be taken. There are times when the future seems thick as a fog; you sit and wait, hoping the mists will lift and reveal the right path. But this is a time when the future seems a door you can walk right through into a room called tomorrow. Great nations of the world are moving toward democracy through the door to freedom. Men and women of the world move toward free markets through the door to prosperity. The people of the world agitate for free expression and free thought through the door to the moral and intellectual satisfactions that only liberty allows. We know what works: Freedom works. We know what's right: Freedom is right. We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on Earth: through free markets, free speech, free elections, and the exercise of free will unhampered by the state."

"Captain James T. Kirk: But one man can change the present."

"The future, it seemed, was turning out to be one damn thing after another."

"Every choice we make allows us to manipulate the future. Do I ask Adrienne or Suzanne to the spring dance? Do I take my holiday on Corsica or on Risa? A person's life, their future, hinges on each of a thousand choices. Living is making choices. Now you ask me to believe that if I make a choice other than the one found in your history books, then your past will be irrevocably altered. Well, you know, Professor, perhaps I don't give a damn about your past, because your past is my future and as far as I'm concerned, it hasn't been written yet."

"There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them. Desire, the strongest thing in the world, is itself all future, and it is not for nothing that in all the religions the motive is always forwards to an endless futurity of bliss or annihilation. Now that religion gives place to science the paradisical future of the soul fades before the Utopian future of the species, and still the future rules. But always there is, on the other side, destiny, that which inevitably will happen, a future here concerned not as the other was with man and his desires, but blindly and inexorably with the whole universe of space and time. The Buddhist seeks to escape from the Wheel of Life and Death, the Christian passes through them in the faith of another world to come, the modern reformer, as unrealistic but less imaginative, demands his chosen future in this world of men. Can we in any better way reconcile desire and fate?"

"Energies emanating from... Aquarius... will (through the effect of its potent force) stimulate... men into a new coherency, into a brotherhood of humanity which will ignore all racial and national differences and will carry the life of men forward into synthesis and unity. This means a tide of unifying life of such power that one cannot now vision it, but which—in a thousand years—will have welded all mankind into a perfect brotherhood."

"I do not mistrust the future; I do not fear what is ahead. For our problems are large, but our heart is larger. Our challenges are great, but our will is greater. And if our flaws are endless, God's love is truly boundless. Some see leadership as high drama, and the sound of trumpets calling, and sometimes it is that. But I see history as a book with many pages, and each day we fill a page with acts of hopefulness and meaning. The new breeze blows, a page turns, the story unfolds. And so today a chapter begins, a small and stately story of unity, diversity, and generosity — shared, and written, together."

"The generation which will come into active thought expression at the end of this century... will inaugurate the framework, structure and fabric of the New Age [of Aquarius], which will start with certain premises, which today are the dream of the more exalted dreamers, and which will develop the civilisatation... This coming age will be as predominantly the age of group interplay, group idealism, and group consciousness, as the Piscean Age has been one of personality unfoldment and emphasis, personality focus, and personality consciousness. Selfishness, as we now understand it, will gradually disappear, for the will of the individual will voluntarily be blended into the group will."

"The ancient symbol for the sign Aquarius (into which our Sun is now entering) is that of the Water-carrier, the man with a pitcher of water. This passing of the Sun into the sign Aquarius is an astronomical fact... not an astrological prognostication. The great spiritual achievement and evolutionary event of that age will be the communion and human relationships established among all peoples, enabling men everywhere to sit down together... and share the bread and wine (symbols of nourishment). Preparations for that shared feast (symbolically speaking) are on their way, and those preparations are being made by the masses of men themselves, as they fight and struggle and legislate for the economic sustenance of their nations, and as the theme of food occupies the attention of legislators everywhere. This sharing, beginning on the physical plane, will prove equally true of all human relations and this will be the great gift of the Aquarian Age to humanity."

"FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured."

"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."

"Don't tell me about the future." said Ford. "I've been all over the future. Spend half my time there. It's the same as anywhere else. Anywhen else. Whatever. Just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air."

"Should not a true understanding of life promote care for the future along with the present? This is the immediate duty of every scientist. Until now scientists have dealt with life as finite — is it not now their mission to see life as extending into Infinity?"

"The problem is that no one gives much of a shit about the future until it actually happens. In the fable of the grasshopper and the ant, human beings are the most frivolous breed of grasshopper that ever was."

"Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present."

"The Terminator: It must end here...or I am the future."

"The future will soon be a thing of the past."

"The past is written, but the future is left for us to write, and we have powerful tools, Rios: openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity. All they have is secrecy, and fear, and fear is the great destroyer, Rios."

"It is by imagining what we truly desire that we begin to go there. That is the kind of thinking about the future that seems to me most fruitful, most rewarding. I want a future in which women are not punished for having women's bodies, are not punished for desire or the lack of it, are viewed as independent protagonists in their own adventures-spiritual, intellectual, romantic, sexual, and creative adventures. That's one reason I read and write speculative fiction."

"The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's."

"I prefer to look on the future as something which is not written in stone. A lot of things can happen in 25 years."

"Whenever the rate of return on capital is significantly and durably higher than the growth rate of the economy, it is all but inevitable that inheritance (of fortunes accumulated in the past) predominates over saving (wealth accumulated in the present). ... The inequality r > g in one sense implies that the past tends to devour the future: wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly, even without labor, than wealth stemming from work, which can be saved. Almost inevitably, this tends to give lasting disproportionate importance to inequalities created in the past, and therefore to inheritance."

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

"Don’t shortchange the future, because of fear in the present."

"If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future."

"Can omniscient God, who Knows the future, find The Omnipotence to Change His future mind?"

"Our immediate task, however, is the critical work of confronting the economic crisis. As I've said, we've passed through an era of profound irresponsibility; now we cannot afford half-measures, and we cannot go back to the kind of risk-taking that leads to bubbles that inevitably bust. So we have a choice. We can shape our future, or let events shape it for us. And if we want to succeed, we can't fall back on the stale debates and old divides that won't move us forward."

"We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future."

"People have always had this craving to know the future. You know, the king used to hire the magician or the forecaster and he'd look in sheep guts, or something, for an answer as to handle the next war. And so there has always been a market for people who purported to know the future based on their expertise. And there's a lot of that still going on — it's just as crazy as when the king was hiring the forecaster who looked at the sheep guts. And people have an economic incentive to sell some nostrum — it can be sold over and over again."

"If someone who knew the future, pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives... could you then kill that child?"

"Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they're designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways."

"The future's uncertain and the end is always near ..."

""The future," as George Soros, the financier and philanthropist once observed, "is not only unknown: it is unknowable." Given that, it seemed like a good idea to take Neil Postman’s two extremes to see how our networked future might unfold. Which kind of future—the Orwellian or the Huxleyean—seems more plausible? Postman thought that the two were mutually exclusive: humanity might have one or the other. But an even gloomier conclusion is that we might wind up with both."