Quotes About Foresight

Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.

If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.

What would help us preserve our natural resources are genetic traits that let us sacrifice the present for the sake of the future. You need wisdom to sacrifice something that is immediately useful or advantageous for the sake of something that will be important in the future.

While knowledge may provide useful point of reference, it cannot become a force to guide the future.

I learned how to fire a sniper rifle, which I'm sure will be useful at some point.

Lord, give us the wisdom to utter words that are gentle and tender, for tomorrow we may have to eat them.

Without wisdom, the future has no meaning, no valuable purpose.

My time at Shell was a most valuable experience because it taught me to look at the world in a long-term way. Shell takes a 20-year view on events and plans for different scenarios. It makes you see the world as a kind of large matrix.

Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.

Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy

What's the opposite of déjà vu, when you see something that hasn't happened yet?" "I don't know—avant verrais?

Strive for the Long Now

Eso es lo malo de las premoniciines, que tienen la molesta costumbre de hacerse realidad.

There was a saying about dust bunnies: by the time you see the teeth, it's too late.

Foresight being the memory of the future, when everything is seeable nothing is any longer foreseeable.

I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.

The ever-recurring law of necessity soon teaches a man to do what he does not like, so as to avert evils which he would dislike still more... this foresight, well or ill used, is the source of all the wisdom or the wretchedness of mankind.

So I was a poodle of the future; I made prophecies.

I have always had a strong interest in history and finding out about the past can be remarkably helpful with working out the future, too.

Seeing ahead is fun. But pushing is very hard work.

This grieved me heartily ; and now I saw, though too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it.

I was one of the few people who thought Star Wars was going to work, and I hadn't even seen any special effects.

The way that I work is that I try to work in metaphors, and you can't write a metaphor unless you know where you're going, so I always think about the future.