John Green, An Abundance of Katherines         “I figured something out," he said aloud. "The future is unpredictable."
Hassan said, "Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice.”

John Green, An Abundance of Katherines         “The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.”

Roger Garaudy         “The future is not a scenario written, which we only have to act out; it is a work which we have to create.”

Anon         "Want to look at the future? Employ a good consultant."

Helen Keller         “To be blind is bad, but worse is to have eyes and not see. "

Malcolm X         “Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.”

Tori Amos: From the Choirgirl Hotel         “Girls you've gotta know when it's time to turn the page.”

Chuck Palahniuk, Rant         “The future you have, tomorrow, won't be the same future you had, yesterday.”

Pope John Paul II         “The future starts today, not tomorrow.”

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters         “The future is just wasted on some people.”

Steven Erikson         “The future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises.”

Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?         “If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.”

Joan of Arc (Reportedly)         “I'm gonna take it as it comes”

Jeremy Aldana         “Be careful not to look so far ahead, that you miss what’s in front of you”

Leonard Sweet         “The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.”

John Lennon         "Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans."

Wayne Gretsky- Canadian ice hockey pro        “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”

Chuck Palahniuk - US author of Fight Club        "When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?"

Eric Hoffer - American social writer        "In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."

Charles Darwin         "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world."

Warren G. Bennis - Professor of Business Administration at the University of Southern California.        "The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

John Maynard Keynes        "The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future."

Jessamyn West         "The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future."

Edward de Bono        "In the future, instead of striving to be right at a high cost, it will be more appropriate to be flexible and plural at a lower cost. If you cannot accurately predict the future then you must flexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures."

Oprah Winfrey         "The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude."

John F. Kennedy         "Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. "

Peter Drucker        "The best way to predict the future is to create it."

Benjamin Franklin        “Look before, or you'll find yourself behind”

Melanie Gustafson       “Whatever your past has been, you have a spotless future.”

Loesje       "The longer you wait for the future, the shorter it will be"

William Gibson, science fiction writer       "If I write something set 60 years in the future I am going to have to explain how humanity got there and that's becoming quite a big job"

Eugene Ionesco        “You can only predict things after they've happened”

French futurist Gaston Berger        “Looking at the future disturbs the present”

Yogi Berra        “The future ain’t what it used to be”

Conservative political thinker Edmund Burke        “You can never plan the future by the past”

Poet T S Eliot        “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past”

Science fiction writer William Gibson        “The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed”.

Statesman Gladstone        “You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side”

Definitive marketer Philip Kotler         “To prepare for the twenty-first century, companies need to imagine alternative scenarios for the marketplace of the future, and use these scenarios to stimulate their thinking about possible contingencies and strategies. My advice, therefore, is get busy building scenarios and determining what they imply in the way of strategic planning. Do not think business as usual”

Ian Wilson, scenario planner        “However good our futures research may be, we shall never be able to escape from the ultimate dilemma that all our knowledge is about the past, and all our decisions are about the future”

A mayor in early twentieth century Pennsylvania        “I can foresee the day when there will be one of these (a telephone) in every town”

Arab proverb        “He who predicts the future lies, even if he tells the truth”

From contributor, Sameer S, origin not revealed,        "The journey is the best part of the destination."

and         "In aspiring the future, do not, not live the present"

Brian Carilli, lab designer in the School of Engineering, Stanford University, California         "Stanford has a product. A lot of people don't know this. We produce a product, and our product is the future."

Jorge Luis Borges        "Every epoch is an epoch of transition. We know only one thing about the future or, rather, futures: it will not look like the present"

Walter Bejamin, German Pholosopher, 1928.         ‘He who asks fortunetellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.' Walter Bejamin, German Pholosopher, 1928.

Antoine de Saint Exupery        'As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it'

African proverb        'For tomorrow belongs to people who prepare for it today' African proverb

The following are all from ‘A Word from the Wise’ by Rosemarie Jarski, Ebury Press (2006), recommended by Bruce LLoyd

Arthur C. Clarke        “This is the first age that has paid much attention to the future, which is rather ironic since we may not have one."

Wendell Berry        “Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us.”

Robertson Davies       “The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to an idealized past.”

Edward G. Robinson        “If He has given us one marvellous gift, it is that He does not permit us to know the future. It would be unbearable.”

John Sladek        “The future will be exactly like the past, only more expensive.”

Isak Dinesen        “God made the world round so we could never see too far down the road.”

Niels Bohr        “Predicting is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”

Alfred North Whitehead        “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”

Jon Bon Jovi        “Map out your future, but do it in pencil.”

D.H. Lawrence        “I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It’s amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.”

The following quotes were used in a UNIDO seminar, Technology Foresight Training for Corporate Managers, 19.-22.2.2007, in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Sayings about the future - Historic quotes:

"Worldwide there will be a market for 4 computers. " (1946)

"3 existing computers would handle all the calculations that would ever be needed in England."(Hartree, 1951)

"There will be a human base on Mars by 2000." (1967).

"In 50 years the world will be without oil." (A.Toffler, 1970‘s)

"Nuclear fusion will be operational by 2020." (quoted in 1970´s) and also repeated in 2000 for 2050

"People will not buy quartz watches." (Swiss watchmakers)

"In 2010 most cars will use hydrogen fuel." (1980´s)

"There is no market for personal computers." (IBM).

John Naisbitt (1996) "The Euro will never happen."

Most people in Latvia in 1980 did not believe that Latvia could be out of communism.– similarly in Russia in 1980.

"Colombia in 15 years will import coffee." (1990)

"The year 2000 (Y2K) will see a global computer crash."

Now going forward:

"This is the future, there are no alternatives."

"In next 20 years the main problem will be climate change."

"The world will be much more dependent on ICT networks."

"Gold will be the currency of the future."

"The only certainty is uncertainty."

"Water will be an expensive commodity in 2020."

"The future belongs not to the strongest but to the fastest."

"What you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." Goethe