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"Walking corpses—zombies—follow us everywhere, through novels, television, cinema. Back in the real world, ordinary citizens turn survivalist, ready to scale a mountain of corpses if it means enduring. Either way, death is what happens to everyone else. By contrast, the future in which I am dead is not a future at all. It has no reality. If it did—if I truly believed that being a corpse was not only a possible future but my only guaranteed future—I'd do all kinds of things differently. I'd get rid of my iPhone, for starters. Lead a different sort of life." Zadie Smith   "It is no secret that a lot of climate-change research is subject to opinion, that climate models sometimes disagree even on the signs of the future changes (e.g. drier vs. wetter future climate). The problem is, only sensational exaggeration makes the kind of story that will get politicians'—and readers'—attention. So, yes, climate scientists might exaggerate, but in today's world, this is the only way to assure any political action and thus more federal financing to reduce the scientific uncertainty." Monika Kopacz   "By the mid-nineteenth century, America was already a synonym in certain French circles for whatever was disturbing or unfamiliar about the present. The criticism of a Pierre Buchez was understandable in the context of the Utopian vision of the Christian socialist tradition: 'It is solidly organized egoism, it is evil made systematic and regular, in a word it is the materialism of human destiny'; but even here it is curious to catch the pessimistic, elegiac note, the sense that in one possible account of human history, the United States was a depressing warning of the future of Europe. More predictable in this respect was Edmond de Goncourt, commenting bleakly on the emerging Paris of the Baron Haussmann: 'It makes me think of some American babylon of the future.'" Tony Judt   "The leading German statesmen, and above all Kaiser Wilhelm, have looked into the distant future and are striving to make Germany's already swiftly-growing position as a world power into a dominating one, reckoning hereby upon becoming the ingenious successor to England in this respect. People in Berlin are, however, well aware that Germany would not be in the position today or for a long time to assume this succession, and for this reason a speedy collapse of English world power is not desired since it is fully recognised that Germany's far-reaching plans are at present only castles in the air. Notwithstanding this, Germany is already preparing with speed and vigour for her self-appointed future mission. In this connection I may permit myself to refer to the constant concern for the growth of German naval forces." Ladislaus von Szogyenyi   "One thing I miss is the time when America had big dreams about the future. Now it seems like nobody has big hopes for the future. We all seem to think that it's going to be just like it is now, only worse." Andy Warhol   "According to the new norm, the child's destiny is not to succeed the parents, but to outmode them; succession has given way to supersession. And this norm is institutionalized not in great communal stories, but in the education system. The schools are no longer oriented to a cultural inheritance that it is their duty to pass on unimpaired, but to the career, which is to say, the future, of the child. The orientation is thus necessarily theoretical, speculative, and mercenary. The child is not educated to return home and be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to leave home and earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community." Wendell Berry   "Never in history has so much power over the future of humanity been concentrated in so few hands as in our case. Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations. Therefore we have to punish wrong ideas as others punish crimes: with death. We were held for madmen because we followed every thought down to its final consequence and acted accordingly. We were compared to the inquisition because, like them, we constantly felt in ourselves the whole weight of responsibility for the super-individual life to come. We resembled the great Inquisitors in that we persecuted the seeds of evil not only in men's deeds, but in their thoughts. We admitted no private sphere, not even inside a man's skull." Arthur Koestler   "You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth—and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity." Thomas Sowell   "I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future every ear is already cocked. For long now our entire European culture has been moving, with a tormenting tension that grows greater from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restless, violent, precipitate, like a river that wants to reach its end." Friedrich Nietzsche   "Keeley recounts that it took 10 years from the passage of the Organic Foods Production Act in 1990 to finalize rules on what counted as organic. The purpose of the law, Keeley writes, was to protect organic food artisans from 'organic quacks.' But, some might argue, since the concept of organic produce is nonscientific—itself derived from quackery—what counts and doesn't count as organic is a matter of opinion that now has legal backing. Sustainability, too, is a nonscientific concept, as can be seen by reference to its origin in the report of the UN World Commission on Environment and Development, better known as the Brundtland Report, in 1987: In essence, sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations. Does it need saying that harmony and enhancing current and future human needs and aspirations permit a vast range of different, even contradictory, interpretations? Nowadays, sustainability has come to be defined almost exclusively in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, principally carbon dioxide, and switching energy generation from hydrocarbons to renewable sources, principally wind and solar. In How the World Really Works, scientist and polymath Vaclav Smil notes that today's list of what constitutes planetary boundaries is very different from what would have counted 40 years ago. Acid rain would have topped the list because 'a broad consensus of the early 1980s saw it as the leading environmental problem.' (Acid rain is an example of a strong scientific consensus that turned out to be mistaken—acidification of streams and lakes was caused by changes in land use, not power-station emissions.)" Rupert Darwall   "To ordain the future in advance in this way, man must first have learned to distinguish necessary events from chance ones, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it, and in general be able to calculate and compute. Man himself must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is to be able to stand security for his own future, which is what one who promises does!" Friedrich Nietzsche   "The fact is that almost the entirety of what one reads in the paper or on the web is speculation. The writer isn't telling you what happened, he is offering an interpretation of what happened, or offering a projection of the future. The best scenario is that these theories are novel, compelling, informed, and based on reporting and research. But that is rarely the case. More often the interpretations of current events, and prophesies of future ones, are merely the products of groupthink or dogma or emotions or wish-casting, memos to friends written by 27-year-olds who, in the words of Ben Rhodes, 'literally know nothing.' There was a time when newspapers printed astrology columns. They no longer need to. The pseudoscience is on the front page." Matthew Continetti   "If the past is so uniformly dark, how can it have brought us to 'the shores of light'? It is no good gesturing at this or that particular person or event: Newton, or Luther, or Columbus, or the invention of printing. The more one knows about any such apparent singularities, the more they merge insensibly into their historical background. Utopianism, in order to justify its own destructiveness, has to paint the past as so bad, and the future as so good, as to make it an insoluble mystery how the one can give birth to the other." David Stove   "The bitter Babylonian disputes about portents, the bloody and passionate Albigensian and Anabaptist heresies, all seem erroneous to us today. At the time, man was completely involved in them, and by expressing them at the risk of his life he made truth exist through them, because truth never reveals itself directly but appears only through errors. In the dispute over universal, or over the Immaculate Conception or transubstantiation, the fate of human reason was at stake. And the fate of reason was also at stake during those big suits certain American states brought against the professors who taught evolution. In each time it is wholly at stake in relation to doctrines which the following time will reject as false. It is possible that evolutionary thinking will someday seem to be our century's greatest insanity; yet in bearing witness to its truth in opposition to the churches, the American professors lived the truth and lived it passionately and absolutely, at their own risk. Tomorrow they will be wrong; today they are absolutely right: the time is always wrong when it is dead, and always right while it is living. People may condemn it later all they want to, but it has already had its own passionate way of loving itself and tearing itself to pieces, against which future judgments are powerless. It has had its taste which it alone has tasted, and which is just as incomparable, just as irremediable, as the taste of wine in our mouth. A book has its absolute truth in its own time. It is lived through like a riot or a famine." Jean-Paul Sartre   "He pardoned rather than punished his enemies, and he made a display of renouncing cruel retribution against fellow Romans, provided they gave up their opposition to him (Cato, Metellus Scipio and most Gauls were quite another matter, and deserved all they got). Caesar had pardoned several of his future assassins, Brutus among them, after they had fought on the Pompeian side in the civil war. In many ways, clementia was the political slogan of Caesar's dictatorship. Yet it provoked as much opposition as gratitude, for the simple reason that, virtue though it may have been in some respects, it was an entirely monarchical one. Only those with the power to do otherwise can exercise mercy. Clementia, in other words, was the antithesis of Republican libertas. Cato was said to have killed himself to escape it." Mary Beard   "To me, the term 'middle-class' connotes a safe, comfortable, middle-of-the road policy. Above all, our language is 'middle-class' in the middle of our road. To drive it to one side or the other or even off the road, is the noblest task of the future." Christian Morgenstern   "By the time of the establishment of the Plantagenet dynasty on the throne of England, a number of principles vital to the future issue of Magna Carta had already been agreed: recognition of a code of Magna Carta laws whether written or, more often, customary and unwritten; the issuing of promises by the king to uphold such laws and to recognize the liberties of his subjects; and a role for the Church in negotiating and broadcasting such promises. Far from being a unique or entirely novel set of principles, Magna Carta was merely the latest in a series of such charters issued by the Kings of England to their subjects in the years before 1154, intended to advertise the King's virtue, to promote peace, and to re-establish harmony between King and community." Nicholas Vincent   "A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built—unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood." William James   "The evil is in the White House at the present. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He's cold. He's mean. He's got ice water for blood." Tip O'Neill   "To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness. Of course, man may hope contrary to all reason, and hope has its pleasures even when unreasonable. It may sustain him for a time; but it cannot survive the repeated disappointments of experience indefinitely. What more can the future offer him than the past, since he can never reach a tenable condition nor even approach the glimpsed ideal? Thus, the more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs. Shall action as such be considered agreeable? First, only on condition of blindness to its uselessness. Secondly, for this pleasure to be felt and to temper and half veil the accompanying painful unrest, such unending motion must at least always be easy and unhampered. If it is interfered with only restlessness is left, with the lack of ease which it, itself, entails." Emile Durkheim