Futures Links / Futures Library

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"Change is hard, but stagnation is fatal." - Dr. Peter Bishop

"Any useful statement about the future should appear to be ridiculous." - Jim Dator

"Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future." & "If you don't develop a strategy of your own, you become a part of someone else's strategy." - Alvin Toffler

"Have you purchased a used future? Is your image of the future, your desired future, yours or is it unconsciously borrowed from someone else?" - Sohail Inayatullah

"It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree." - Buckminster Fuller

"The future isn't what it used to be." - Paul Valéry

"Doubt is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd one." - Voltaire

"Foresight provides the ability to influence the future rather than predict it." - Richard Freeman Chief Economist ICI

"I believe that Strategic Foresight is a fundamental tool kit for an organization to understand why something happens today or will happen in the future." - Juha Putkiranta, Vice President, Nokia Mobile Phones, Finland

"Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force." - Marshall McLuan

"You can analyse the past, but you need to design the future. That is the difference between suffering the future and enjoying it." - Edward de Bono

"You see things and say why. I dream things that never were, and I say 'Why not?'" - George Bernard Shaw

"One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

"To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect." - Oscar Wilde

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage

"One should use forecasts ... not believe them." - Hogarth and Makridakis

“The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society's image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive.” - Fred Polak

"At first, people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, and then they begin to hope it can be done. Then they see it can be done. Then it is done, and the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago." - Frances Hodgson Burnett

"A new idea is condemned as ridiculous, and then is dismissed as trivial, until it finally becomes what everybody knows." - William James

"The first postmaster was Charles Emory Smith. In 1900, he was Postmaster General in New York City. At the time, they had started to use tubes to send mail between selected points in the city. Just like the ones the banks use in their drive through’s. Here is what Mr. Smith said about the future of mail: “It would not be surprising to see … the extension of the pneumatic tube system to every house, thus insuring the immediate delivery of mail as soon as it arrives in the city”. What would you have predicted? Half a century later, Arthur Summerfield was the U.S. Postmaster General. It was 1959 and Eisenhower was the president. Here is Summerfield’s version of the future of mail: “Before man reaches the moon your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.” … And then, less than another half a century later, there was email! No rockets, no pneumatic tubes; no physical system at all, just bits, period. Packages filled with atoms were replaced by packets filled with bits and bytes. The whole encyclopedia Britannica in one single EMAIL. Because of that, Email didn’t just change the nature of mail. It changed the way we communicate. We all suffer from the postmaster’s syndrome. We can only think the things we already know. So, here is what we need to remember: When a prediction sounds logical, it will probably not happen. If, however, it sounds impossible, or even better: nonsensical, the odds are a million times better. What will surely happen though, is the unthinkable. You can bet on that." - Jan Amkreutz about digeality

"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." - Winston Churchill


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


"Everybody talks about the future, but no one does anything about it." - David Pearce Snyder



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