Archive

Quotes

The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.

—Paul Valéry, 1931

Little folks become their little fate.

—Horace, c. 20 BC

Men are able to assist fortune but not to thwart her. They can weave her designs, but they cannot destroy them.

—Niccolò Machiavelli, 1531

People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.

—Edmund Burke, 1790

The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later.

—George Moore, 1888

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

—Ray Bradbury, 1992

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

—Oscar Wilde, 1893

Every man takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851

I’ve seen the future, brother; it is murder.

—Leonard Cohen, 1992

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1816

A change of fortune hurts a wise man no more than a change of the moon.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1732

It would be madness, and inconsistency, to suppose that things which have never yet been performed can be performed without employing some hitherto untried means.

—Francis Bacon, 1620

The future...something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

—C.S. Lewis, 1941