He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

What’s amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It’s so far away in time that they can’t appreciate what it means for their whole life.

Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

It’s going to be the year of the sharp elbow and the quick tongue.

We will burn that bridge when we come to it.

I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to match our future.

Now from a distance, I look back on what the Corps taught me: to think like men of action, and to act like men of thought!

Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

If you want to have sustained joy, you have to not only make sure that you think right, but you also have to make decisions now that are going to guarantee some joy in the future.

If I said I would knock out Sonny Liston in 1 minute and 49 seconds of the first round, that would hurt the gate.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

Be nice to your children. After all, they are going to choose your nursing home.

There’s an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I’m no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.

What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

Have you ever asked yourselves what you are going to do when you grow up? In all likelihood you will get married, and before you know where you are, you will be mothers and fathers; and you will then be tied to a job, or to the kitchen, in which you will gradually wither away. Is that all that your life is going to be?

I got an album concept called ‚Exit Strategy,‘ that might be one of my last ones. It’s a term they use in business when you build companies. You create an exit strategy as you make a company. You don’t wait till you’re five years in it; you create a exit strategy as you make the company.

We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we’re so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it’s not going to be around forever.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

My public is growing up just as I am. After all, I’m not 19 anymore and if I stick with the sex bit, who will be paying to see me when I’m 50?

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10.

It is not scientifically possible to accurately predict the outcome of an action. To suggest otherwise runs contrary to historical experience and the nature of war.

The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

If I don’t run for president, we’ll all be OK.

Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.

It’s hard for a player to plan for the future, especially in a game like football.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

I’m not a fortune-teller.

You can never plan the future by the past.

I have a problem with too much money. I can’t reinvest it fast enough, and because I reinvest it, more money comes in. Yes, the rich do get richer.

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

Only you can control your future.

You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don’t believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can’t possibly foresee now.

When I’m in management meetings when we’re deciding my future, those decisions are left up to me. I’m the one who has to go out and fulfill all these obligations, so I should be able to choose which ones I do or not. That’s the part of my life where I feel most in control.

Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building arks does.

I’m not a futurist.

My business is to prevent the future.

Our real problem, then, is not our strength today; it is rather the vital necessity of action today to ensure our strength tomorrow.

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

In my line of work, the enemy gets a vote.

Invest three percent of your income in yourself (self-development) in order to guarantee your future.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

I have a deep, deep belief that if I tell you I’m going to crack you with a clean shot to the chin inside one minute of the first round and you will be unconscious, well, then that’s what will happen.

Who is the wise man? He who sees what’s going to be born.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

You can make a board for all the goals you want in your life with the pictures on it, and that’s great, daydreaming is wonderful, but you can never plan your future.

The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

It’s when children are 15, 16 or 17 that they decide whether they want to be a doctor, an engineer, a politician or go to the Mars or moon. That is the time they start having a dream, and that’s the time you can work on them. You can help them shape their dreams.

When I’m in my 50s, I kind of think I’ll want to be in a garden.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.