Selected Quotations

-- a university of arizona course on methods and approaches for studying the future

A few quotations are listed below that help one realize we don't know as much as we thiink we know.

You can look up more in John Bartlett's Familiar Quotations or the Quotations Page

Prediction is extremely difficult. Especially about the future.
- Niels Bohr (and attributed to others in slightly different form)

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
- Chinese Proverb

To guess is cheap. To guess wrong is expensive
- Old Chinese Proverb

A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually
- Abba Eban

I am not a teacher but an awakener
- Robert Frost

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1-2 tons
- Popular Mechanics, March 1949

The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.
- Leonard I. Sweet

The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.
- Alvin Toffler

Telling the future by looking at the past assumes conditions remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.
- Herb Brody

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.
- Albert Einstein

There is nothing permanent except change
- Heraclitus (c. 540- c. 470 BCE)

I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way
- Mark Twain

Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory

The only certainty is that nothing is certain
- From a Chinese restaurant fortune cookie I received in 2000 (Roger Caldwell)