All progress is based upon a universal, innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1890Quotes
We must confess that at present the rich predominate, but the future will be for the virtuous and ingenious.
—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
—Oscar Wilde, 1893The future comes like an unwelcome guest.
—Edmund Gosse, 1873God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.
—Arthur Koestler, 1967The less a man knows about the past and the present, the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.
—Sigmund Freud, 1927I’ve seen the future, brother; it is murder.
—Leonard Cohen, 1992The world began without man, and it will end without him.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955Little folks become their little fate.
—Horace, c. 20 BCMy interest is in the future, because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.
—Charles F. Kettering, 1946The future is no more uncertain than the present.
—Walt Whitman, 1856Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it—have not prophesied that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence.
—James Russell Lowell, 1884As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.
—Charles Darwin, 1859