Quotes by Futurists

Conscious Evolution"Conscious evolution inspires in us a mysterious and humble awareness that we have been created by this awesome process of evolution and are now being transformed by it." Barbara Marx Hubbard
Barbara Marx Hubbard
Cultural transformation announces itself in sputtering fits and starts sparked here and there by minor incidents warmed by new ideas that may smolder for decades. In many different places at different times the kindling is laid for the real conflagration-the one that will consume the old landmarks and alter the landscape forever.
Marilyn Ferguson
You've got to think about "big things" while you're doing small things so that all the small things go in the right direction.
Alvin Toffler
We can never give up the belief that good guys always win. And that we are the good guys.
Faith Popcorn
Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom.
Marilyn Ferguson
Risk always brings its own rewards: the exhilaration of breaking through of getting to the other side the relief of a conflict healed the clarity when a paradox dissolves.
Marilyn Ferguson
Individuals learn faster than institutions and it is always the dinosaur's brain that is the last to get the new messages.
Hazel Henderson
Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.
Alvin Toffler
Fear is a question: What are you afraid of and why? Just as the seed of health is an illness because illness contains information our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.
Marilyn Ferguson
Individuals learn faster than institutions and it is always the dinosaur's brain that is the last to get the new messages.
Hazel Henderson
Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.
Alvin Toffler
Fear is a question: What are you afraid of and why? Just as the seed of health is an illness because illness contains information our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.
Marilyn Ferguson
Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.
John Naisbitt
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another either by argument or emotional appeal.
Marilyn Ferguson
One of the best-kept secrets in America is that people are aching to make a commitment if they only had the freedom and environment in which to do so.
John Naisbitt
The big-business mergers and the big-labour mergers have the appearance of dinosaurs mating.
John Naisbitt
You are a big country now but you still tend to feel small and fragile. If the United States gets a cold you get pneumonia.
Herman Kahn
If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.
Hazel Henderson
Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence
Arthur C. Clarke
Many of the fundamental physical constants-which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked-are in fact very precised adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Universe that makes our existence possible.
Arthur C. Clarke
He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality.
Robert Anton Wilson
Death defeats us in the end. But our children are our revenge against it.
Bruce Sterling
Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological
Arthur C. Clarke
The most thoroughly and relentlessly damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all 'Damned Things' is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this 'Damned Thing' into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into their slots.
Robert Anton Wilson
In Einstein's equation, time is a river. It speeds up, meanders, and slows down. The new wrinkle is it can have whirlpools and fork into two rivers. So, if the river of time can be bent into a pretzel, create whirlpools and fork into two rivers, then time travel cannot be ruled out.
Michio Kaku
If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.
Arthur C. Clarke
In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-bestscience writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fictionwriter.[dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three]
Arthur C. Clarke
«I love both her and them. I have come to understand that she is what they are. A woman accepts a man, expecting that he will change. A man takes a woman, expecting that she will never change. They are both disappointed. Yet within this very disappointment is the primal source of all new men and all new women»
Bruce Sterling
…mysticism –perhaps the main aberration of the human mind.
Arthur C. Clarke
That night he wrote in his diary, "Challenge a remaining taboo." It was that simple. He had always wanted to understand genius, and now he had the formula. Freud, living in an age that prized its own seeming rationality, had found one of the remaining taboos and dared to think beyond it: he discovered infant sexuality and the unconscious, among other things. Galileo had gone beyond the taboo "Thou shalt not question Aristotle." Every great discovery had been the breaking of a taboo.
Robert Anton Wilson
«“Everybody is in trouble with my dad. My dad only sort of gets the Internet. My dad started looking up all his old enemies on Facebook. My dad picks big flamewar fights. It’s like my dad just discovered that people can talk about politics without his permission. Facebook is like his new drug, he’s getting all sweaty and manic... Farfalla, is Facebook the work of the Devil? Google is ‘not evil,’ but nobody ever said that Facebook was ‘not evil.’”»
Bruce Sterling
«Brixie wasn’t talking to him, or listening to him. Nothing like that at all. Brixie was off in her own world, flaming away like a blowtorch. She was such an Internet fiend that she had never learned any other way to behave.»
Bruce Sterling
A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
Stewart Brand
In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time.
Michio Kaku
After that cancellation [of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, after $2 billion had been spent on it], we physicists learned that we have to sing for our supper. ... The Cold War is over. You can't simply say “Russia!” to Congress, and they whip out their checkbook and say, “How much?” We have to tell the people why this atom-smasher is going to benefit their lives.
Michio Kaku
Michael O'Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be answered by physics and which ones by religion.
Arthur C. Clarke
We cannot rely on trial-and-error approaches to deal with existential risks… We need to vastly increase our investment in developing specific defensive technologies… We are at the critical stage today for biotechnology, and we will reach the stage where we need to directly implement defensive technologies for nanotechnology during the late teen years of this century… A self-replicating pathogen, whether biological or nanotechnology based, could destroy our civilization in a matter of days or weeks.
Ray Kurzweil
After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization.
Arthur C. Clarke
‎What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror?...The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection?In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon.
Kevin Kelly
Makers?" said Toby. Jaysir nodded."We're not loners, you know. There just weren't any on Wallop. We love to get together, we just refuse to engage in social relations that are based on material inequity.
Karl Schroeder
You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.
Alvin Toffler
There are gods, but there is no God; and all gods become devils eventually.
Robert Anton Wilson
Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.
Arthur C. Clarke
When you're dealing with these forces or powers in a philosophic and scientific way, contemplating them from an armchair, that rationalistic approach is useful. It is quite profitable then to regard the gods and goddesses and demons as projections of the human mind or as unconscious aspects of ourselves. But every truth is a truth only for one place and one time, and that's a truth, as I said, for the armchair. When you're actually dealing with these figures, the only safe, pragmatic and operational approach is to treat them as having a being, a will, and a purpose entirely apart from the humans who evoke them. If the Sorcerer's Apprentice had understood that, he wouldn't have gotten into so much trouble.
Robert Anton Wilson
The woman who emerged had to be eight feet tall. Her hair was every shade of purple, piled in buns and hanging in braids, and all of it sprinkled with gems like stars.
Brenda Cooper
Information wants to be free.
Stewart Brand
Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself.
Arthur C. Clarke
A primary reason that people believe that life is getting worse is because our information about the problems of the world has steadily improved. If there is a battle today somewhere on the planet, we experience it almost as if we were there. DuringWorld War II, tens of thousands of people might perish in a battle, and if the public could see it at all it was in a grainy newsreel in a movie theater weeks later. During World War I a small elite could read about the progress of the conflict in the newspaper(without pictures). During the nineteenth century there was almost no access to news in a timely fashion for anyone.
Ray Kurzweil
Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.
Arthur C. Clarke
The real bottleneck is software. Creating software can be done only the old-fashioned way. A human -sitting quietly in a chair with a pencil, paper and laptop- is going to have to write the codes... One can mass-produce hardware and increase it's power by piling on more and more chips, but you cannot mass-produce the brain.
Michio Kaku
These computer simulations try only to duplicate the interactions between the cortex and the thalamus. Huge chunks of the brain are therefore missing. Dr. [Dharmendra] Modha understands the enormity of his project. His ambitious research has allowed him to estimate what it would take to create a working model of the entire human brain, and not just a portion or a pale version of it, complete with all parts of the neocortex and connections to the senses. He envisions using not just a single Blue Gene computer [with over a hundred thousand processors and terabytes of RAM] but thousands of them, which would fill up not just a room but an entire city block. The energy consumption would be so great that you would need a thousand-megawatt nuclear power plant to generate all the electricity. And then, to cool off this monstrous computer so it wouldn't melt, you would need to divert a river and send it through the computer circuits.It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degrees, uses twenty watts of power, and needs only a few hamburgers to keep it going.
Michio Kaku
The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank his fill of the muddy water. Honor had been satisfied; each group had staked its claim to its own territory.
Arthur C. Clarke
The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.
Robert Anton Wilson
If you don’t have a sense of wonder it’s like you’re dead inside. But your sense of wonder can be used to trick you. You can have a sense of wonder over a thing that’s basically a conjurer’s trick, or a con job, or a rip-off.
Bruce Sterling
Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century.
Stewart Brand
He had sometimes wondered if the real reason why men sought danger was that only thus could they find the companionship and solidarity which they unconsciously craved.
Arthur C. Clarke
Stupidity is like bumping into a wall all the time. After a while you get tired of it and try to look the situation over and see if there’s a doorway somewhere. I think most people eventually do look for the doorway and stop bumping into the wall
Robert Anton Wilson
A complaint is a unique opportunity to strengthen the relationship with the client.
Kevin Kelly
When you drop any new idea in the pond of the world, you get a ripple effect. You have to be aware that you will be creating a cascade of change.
Joel A. Barker