4,759 Quotes About Future

What lays behind the door of tomorrow has been readied by the events of today. But neither will matter if I’m blocking the door.

Posterity does not accept half measures. If you don't want to be treated like an idiot mass, you don't have to behave like one.

Sometimes, when it’s quiet and I’m alone with you, I ask myself what I’d give to see your whole life all laid out like a photo album. To know every bliss and calamity before it happens.

If we can tackle the inequalities that make our current market societies so brutal, we might have a chance of deploying market mechanisms to organize consumption in an ecologically limited world, allowing all of us to come through capitalism and climate change as equals—“alive in the sunshine,” as the eco-socialist and Jacobin magazine editor Alyssa Battistoni says in a reference to Virginia Woolf.

Mainstream economists have for generations made the same argument about the supposed danger that automation poses to labor. If some jobs are automated, they argue, labor is freed up for other, new, and perhaps better kinds of work. They point to agriculture, which once occupied most of the workforce but now occupies only about 2 percent of it in a country like the United States.

The right to intellectual property is ultimately not a right to a concrete thing but to a pattern. That is, it does not just protect “your right to control your copy of your idea” in the way that it protects my right to control my shoes or my house. Rather, it grants the right to tell others how to use copies of an idea that they “own.

Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.

Who are you sending into the future and how are you sending them? For this is the stuff of legacy that we tend to forget until long after we’ve sent them.

In search of foreveryou will lose your today.