Quotes About Future

The premise of the session is a short speech: "Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.

The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do. Know is not the only word that fosters this illusion. In common usage, the words intuition and premonition also are reserved for past thoughts that turned out to be true.

Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control.

Many intelligent and well-informed people were keenly interested in the future of the economy and did not believe a catastrophe was imminent; I infer from this fact that the crisis was not knowable. What is perverse about the use of know in this context is not that some individuals get credit for prescience that they do not deserve. It is that the language implies that the world is more knowable than it is. It helps perpetuate a pernicious illusion.

objective ignorance accumulates steadily the further you look into the future.

The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do.

The Illusions of Pundits The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained

What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.

flawed stories of the past shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future. Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.

People in their 30s know where the world is going because they're going to do it. I'm in my 80s so I have no idea.

It was both odd and unjust, a real example of pitiful arbitrariness of existance, that you were born into a particular time & held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-a-vis the future.

È bizzarro e ingiusto, disse Gauss, il fatto che si nasce in una determinata epoca e, volenti o nolenti, vi si resta imprigionati: un esempio calzante della penosa accidentalità dell'esistenza. Così uno ha un vantaggio spropositato rispetto al passato e diventa lo zimbello del futuro.

Seltsam sei es und ungerecht, sagte Gauß, so recht ein Beispiel für die erbärmliche Zufälligkeit der Existenz, dass man in einer bestimmten Zeit geboren und ihr verhaftet sei, ob man wolle oder nicht. Es verschaffe einem einen unziemlichen Vorteil vor der Vergangenheit und mache einen zum Clown der Zukunft.

Lo sapeva già, ora lui le avrebbe detto che in futuro non ci sarebbe stata alcuna differenza fra quelle regioni, che presto nessuno avrebbe mosso un dito per quello per cui adesso si sacrificava la vita. Ma tutto ciò cosa cambiava? Una certa confidenza con il futuro è una forma di codardia. Credeva davvero che la gente sarebbe diventata più intelligente? Un po' sì, rispose Gauss. Per forza di cose. Ma viviamo in questo momento! Purtroppo, disse.

It was both odd and injust, a real example of the pitiful arbitrariness of existence, that you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-a-vis the future.

Writing a novel, said Humboldt, seemed to him the perfect way to capture the most fleeting essence of the present for the future.

It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system." —WILLIAM JAMES, AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER

Christians today, no less than people of other faiths, are caught between pervasive apathy and acts of violence, apathy born of hopelessness about the enormity of the evils that confront us and recourse to violence and coercion that seriously compromises or even destroys the goals of a better future. Either way, we can close off the future to which we are directed by God our creator and redeemer.

In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.

You cannot disconnect the future from the present and you cannot disconnect the present from the past. That's not how time works. Time moves in a continuous motion.

Only through acknowledgment of the erasure and void of Jewish life can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.

I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197

To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine-ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn't and has never been, but as it might be. The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.