„To act is to anchor in the imminent future.“
History and Utopia (1960)
Emil M. Cioran529
Romanian philosopher and essayist 1911 - 1995Related quotes
„The vendors seemed comical, so intent were they on their slivers of meaningless profit, all unaware of the desolate ages that lay in their own near future, their own imminent deaths.“
— Arthur C. Clarke, book The Light of Other Days
Source: The Light of Other Days (2000), Chapter 26
„Today we can change the future for someone, we have only to act.“
— Michael Elmore-Meegan British humanitarian 1959
Surprised by Joy
„A speculator is a man who observes the future, and acts before it occurs.“
— Bernard Baruch American businessman 1870 - 1965
20,000 Quotes and Quips by Evan Esar (1968) original quote in Baruch, Bernard, The Public Years. NY, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960, p.31.
„Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour.“
— William Wordsworth English Romantic poet 1770 - 1850
The River Duddon, sonnet 34 - Afterthought, l. 10 (1820).
„The future is not a scenario written, which we only have to act out; it is a work which we have to create.“
— Roger Garaudy French philosopher 1913 - 2012
„Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.“
— Simone de Beauvoir French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist 1908 - 1986
Attributed
Source: As quoted in The Book of Positive Quotations (2007) by John Cook, p. 548
„I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples.“
— William James American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist 1842 - 1910
1900s, The Moral Equivalent of War (1906)
Context: I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples.
All these beliefs of mine put me firmly into the anti-military party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.
„It is possible for you to project to a future event in which you will be involved and by an act that you make in the projection, alter the course that this future will take. Such an action would therefore appear to happen twice, once in your present and once in your future. But in the future, you would be the one whose course is altered from this traveling self from the past.“
— Jane Roberts American Writer 1929 - 1984
Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 322, quoting from Session 262
„We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.“
— Jimmy Carter American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981) 1924
„What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future. […] Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.“
— Ted Chiang, book Stories of Your Life and Others
Story of Your Life; first appeared in Starlight 2, 1998.
Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)
„Yes, we are living in a world of fear. The life of man today is corroded and made bitter by fear. Fear of the future, fear of the hydrogen bomb, fear of ideologies. Perhaps this fear is a greater danger than the danger itself, because it is fear which drives men to act foolishly, to act thoughtlessly, to act dangerously....“
— Sukarno first President of the Republic of Indonesia 1901 - 1970
Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference
„One should think that you're someone living in the future and that you have to judge—approve or disapprove—the I that acts today, the I that keeps up or fails.“
— Eyvind Johnson Swedish writer 1900 - 1976
"Om mod" in: Tor Andræ and Anders Österling, I angeläget ärende, Stockholm: A. Bonnier, 1941.
Original: (sv) Man bör tänka sig själv som en person som finns i framtiden och kan bedöma – fördöma eller gilla – det jag som handlar idag, det jag som håller stånd eller sviker.
„The social system tends to be dominated by images… especially of the future, which act cybernetically, constantly guided by perceived divergences between the real and the ideal“
— Kenneth E. Boulding British-American economist 1910 - 1993
Source: 1970s, Toward a General Social Science, 1974, p. vii as cited by Debora Hammond (1995) "Perspectives from the Boulding files". In: Systems Research Vol. 12 No. 4, p. 281-290
„Culture is the personality of an organization. Therefore, culture governs much of how people think, act, interact, with others, and do their work. It is extremely powerful in determining the present and continuing success and the future direction of any organization Culture can literally determine whether a company has a future.“
— Don Soderquist 1934 - 2016
Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 27.
On the Importance of Culture
„The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present—they are real.“
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Vorkosigan Saga
Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 9 (p. 141)
„The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valéry once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.“
— Daniel Dennett American philosopher 1942
Kinds of Minds (1996)