The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.
—Paul Valéry, 1931Quotes
Not 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, 1884The future comes like an unwelcome guest.
—Edmund Gosse, 1873We must confess that at present the rich predominate, but the future will be for the virtuous and ingenious.
—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688A change of fortune hurts a wise man no more than a change of the moon.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1732All progress is based upon a universal, innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1890The future is no more uncertain than the present.
—Walt Whitman, 1856The 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, 1888People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
—Edmund Burke, 1790The world began without man, and it will end without him.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955Men are able to assist fortune but not to thwart her. They can weave her designs, but they cannot destroy them.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, 1531Every man takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851Often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them; it is destiny which makes them prudent.
—Voltaire, 1764