Futurism Quotes

“We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“I foresee death by culture shock.”
― Woody Allen

“Futurists imagine multiple possible futures, as quantum physicists are set on multiple present realities.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners looked like pencil sharpeners—your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future.”
― William Gibson

“In our UN-VICE world (UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex & Exponential), the lines between the present and future are becoming blurred, more liminal.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“Despite the unpredictability of our complex world, focusing on constants is still insightful. Relative to the variabilities of change, the unwavering direction and consistent rhythm of constants stand out.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“If you ask me what remains to be known in the future, I’ll say, ‘Memorize all the world’s encyclopedias.’ Once you do that, forget all that fancy junk and rake the leaves – else I’m gonna take a stick to you, boy.”
― M.C. Humphreys

“He who does not forget his first love will not recognize his last.”
― Vladimir Mayakovsky, Пощёчина общественному вкусу

“The road ahead is long and there will be many setbacks. Success is not assured… but the price of failure has never been this high.”
― Charles Lee Lesher, Shadow on the Moon

“Introduce surprise and the need to move among the spectators of the orchestra, boxes, and balcony. Some random suggestions: spread a powerful glue on some of the seats, so that the male or female spectator will stay glued down and make everyone laugh (the damaged frock coat or toilette will naturally be paid for at the door) - sell the same ticket to ten people: traffic jam, bickering, and wrangling - offer free tickets to gentlemen or ladies who are notoriously unbalanced, irritable, or eccentric and likely to provoke uproars with obscene gestures, pinching women, or other freakishness. Sprinkle the seats with dust to make people itch and sneeze, .etc.”
― Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings

“There is no such thing as an "out of the blue" invention. All new forms of innovation are derived from knowledge gain through previous innovation and the evolving needs of business and society.

In 2030 we will have technologies and solutions that most of us can not yet see, however in 2030 we will see the clear evolutionary link between innovation in 2020 and solutions in 2030.”
― Tom Golway

“Biotechnology has made it technologically possible to build the monster; patent law is making it politically possible.”
― Neil Gerlach, Becoming Biosubjects: Bodies. Systems. Technology.

“An element of human invention transforms the natural into the cultural, rendering a higher life form an invention, an effect of the operation of biopower.”
― Neil Gerlach, Becoming Biosubjects: Bodies. Systems. Technology.

“If don’t know what you want, you have to be content with whatever you get.”
― Tom Meyers, Futurize Yourself

“Don't let life stand in the way of y'our future.”
― Tom Meyers, Futurize Yourself

“Gray is a hue created with swirls of white gouache and a daub of midnight pain.”
― Bibiana Krall, Mint

“Let's imagine we're standing together on the launch pad at NASA's Cape Canaveral facility near Orlando, and staring up at the stars together. As I write this, the last constellation above the horizon is Centaurus. The centaur's front head is a bright star. In fact, it's three stars—a pair called Alpha Centauri A and B, and, dimmest of the trio, Proxima Centauri. Here, look through this telescope. See? You can tell them apart. But what we can't see is that there is, in fact, a planet circling the faint light of Proxima Centauri. Man, I wish we could see it. Because that planet, Proxima Centauri b, is the nearest known exoplanet to Earth.
[...]
If we were to board a spacecraft and ride it from the outer edge of our atmosphere all the way to Proxima Centauri b, you and I, who boarded the ship fit and trim, chosen as we were from billions of applicants, would die before the voyage reached even 1/100th of the intervening distance. [...] At a speed of 20,000 miles per hour—the speed of our top-performing modern rockets—4.2 light years translates to more than 130,000 years of space travel.
[...] So how will we ever get there? A generation ship. [...] the general notion is this: get enough human beings onto a ship, with adequate genetic diversity among us, that we and our fellow passengers cohabitate as a village, reproducing and raising families who go on to mourn you and me and raise new of their own, until, thousands of years after our ship leaves Earth's gravity, the distant descendants of the crew that left Earth finally break through the atmosphere of our new home.
[...] A generation ship is every sociological and psychological challenge of modern life squashed into a microcosmic tube of survival and amplified—generation after generation.
[...] The idea of a generation ship felt like a pointless fantasy when I first encountered it. But as I've spent the last few years speaking with technologists, academics, and policy makers about the hidden dangers of building systems that could reprogram our behavior now and for generations to come, I realized that the generation ship is real. We're on board it right now.
On this planet, our own generation ship, we were once passengers. But now, without any training, we're at the helm. We have built lives for ourselves on this planet that extend far beyond our natural place in this world. And now we are on the verge of reprogramming not only the planet, but one another, for efficiency and profit. We are turning systems loose on the decks of the ship that will fundamentally reshape the behavior of everyone on board, such that they will pass those behaviors on to their progeny, and they might not even realize what they've done. This pattern will repeat itself, and play out over generations in a behavioral and technological cycle.”
― Jacob Ward, The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back

“I do not truly fight because I want to be king or Emperor or whatever word you slap above my name in the history texts. The universe does not notice us. There is no supreme being waiting to end existence when the last man breathes his final breath. Man will end. That is the fact accepted, but never discussed. And the universe will continue without care. “I will not let that happen, because I believe in man. I would have us continue forever. I would shepherd us out of the Solar System into alien ones. Seek new life. We are barely in our infancy as a species. But I would make man the immutable fixture in the universe, not just some passing bacteria that flashes and fades with no one to remember.”
― Pierce Brown, Golden Son

“It is better to be surprised by a simulation, rather than blindsided by reality”
― Stuart Candy

“I am the future”
― Bibiana Krall, Quantum-C

“I am the future.”
― Bibiana Krall, Quantum-C

“Although the characteristic of noise is that of reminding us brutally of life, the Art of Noises should not limit itself to an imitative reproduction. It will achieve its greatest emotional power in acoustical enjoyment itself, which the inspiration of the artist will know how to draw from the combining of noises.”
― Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noise

“It will not be through a succession of noises imitative of life but through a fantastic association of the different timbres and rhythms that the new orchestra will obtain the most complex and novel emotions of sound.”
― Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noise

“I believe that the vision of most, if not all, sci-fi writers is to warn humanity of all present and future dangers. Well, that's what I'm doing, anyway, occasionally having fun with fantasy, adventure, and pure fiction.”
― Bob Bello, Starcall Anthology 1

“Легче трьом верблюдам
з теличкою
в 1/8 вушка голки
пролізти
ніж футуристові крізь укрлітературу до
своїх продертись.
Я протяг вас
через всі нетрі й
усіма головними вулицями столиць.
Що ж ви —
будете топтатися й далі
як отара
овець?”
― Mykhail Semenko, В садах безрозних

“After all, today’s debate between today’s religions, ideologies, nations and classes will in all likelihood disappear along with Homo sapiens. If our successors indeed function on a different level of consciousness (or perhaps possess something beyond consciousness that we cannot even conceive), it seems doubtful that Christianity or Islam will be of interest to them, that their social organisation could be Communist or capitalist, or that their genders could be male or female.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The future belongs to the daughters of defiance.”
― Bibiana Krall, Axon Drift

“But make no-mistake— I want to go to outer space. I want to see humankind construct cities on far-off planets and moons. That doesn’t make it right, though, and it doesn’t mean that now is the time to do so.”
― Savannah Mandel, Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration

“Сюрреалізм успадкував від футуризму його схильність до безладу, яка змішує мистецтво і життя. Футуристи закликали до «алогічних» дій, які інспіруються військовим патріотизмом, сюрреалісти — до архібунтівних вчинків, черпаючи натхнення з революційного комунізму.

Як у одних, так і у других філософія дії залишилася літературним жестом, який не вів безпосередньо до практичних починань.

У футуристів перехід до практики був дуже полегшений тією обставиною, що через кілька років після їх літературних декларацій Італія взяла участь у світовій війні, і парадоксальний у 1910 році військовий патріотизм і культ ірраціональної дії перетворилися протягом однієї ночі, згідно з декретом про мобілізацію, в доктрину, яка стала обов'язковою для італійців з усіма її практичними наслідками. Цей декрет, перетворивши миттю у футуристів сотні тисяч спокійних громадян, позбавив прихильників Марінетті всієї їх оригінальності. Фашизм ще більше поглибив цей процес нівелювання, топлячи практичний футуризм у загальності й повсякденності. Футуристи стали схожими на всіх лояльних громадян, отримали разом з іншими ордени й помалу розчинилися серед сорока мільйонів інших футуристів.”
― Jerzy Stempowski, Eseje dla Kassandry

“Stephen, how do we know what the ultimate good of Humanity will entail? We haven’t at our disposal the infinite factors that the Machine has at its! Perhaps, to give you a not unfamiliar example, our entire technical civilization has created more unhappiness and misery than it has removed. Perhaps an agrarian or pastoral civilization, with less culture and less people would be better. If so, the Machines must move in that direction, preferably without telling us, since in our ignorant prejudices we only know that what we are used to, is good — and we would then fight change. Or perhaps a complete urbanization, or a completely caste-ridden society, or complete anarchy, is the answer. We don’t know. Only the Machines know, and they are going there and taking us with them.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot