Connections (1979), 1 - The Trigger Effect
Context: The Egyptians built an empire and ran it with a handful of technology... the wheel, irrigation canals, the loom, the calendar, pen & ink, some cutting tools, some simple metallurgy, and the plough, the invention that triggered it all off. And yet look how complex and sophisticated their civilisation was. And how soon it happened, after that first man-made harvest. The Egyptian plough and those of the few other civilisations sprang up around the world at the same time... Gave us control over nature... And at the same time, tied us for good, to the things that we invent so that tomorrow will be better than today. The Egyptians knew that. That's why they had gods. To make sure that their systems didn't fail.
“Let us sacrifice our today so that our children can have a better tomorrow.”
“The good times of today are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.”
Variant: The good times of today are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.
“I'm scared. What will tomorrow bring? It has to be better than today. It has to.”
Source: By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead
In: Philosophy & Social Action (2003)
"Tomorrow" (1919), as translated in A Soviet Heretic : Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1970) edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg
Context: Every today is at the same time both a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow are equally near to one another, and equally far. They are generations, they are grandfathers, fathers, and grandsons. And grandsons invariably love and hate the fathers; the fathers invariably hate and love the grandfathers.
Today is doomed to die — because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the wise and cruel law. Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow; wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation. He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already turned to a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. This is the constant dialectic path which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity. Yesterday, the thesis; today, the antithesis, and tomorrow, the synthesis.
“To copy the truth can be a good thing, but to invent the truth is better, much better.”
Copiare il vero può essere una buona cosa, ma inventare il vero è meglio, molto meglio.
Letter to Clara Maffei, October 20, 1876, cited from James P. Cassaro (ed.) Music, Libraries and the Academy (Middleton, Wisconsin: A-R Editions, 2007) p. 218; translation from the same source.
Responding to the accusation that Alibaba sells fake merchandise. "Jack Ma Says Fakes 'Better Quality and Better Price Than the Real Names'” http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/06/15/jack-ma-says-fakes-better-quality-and-better-price-than-the-real-names/, CHINA REAL TIME REPORT, The Wall Street Journal (June 15, 2016)
“Today was a difficult day. Tomorrow will be better”
Variant: Today was a difficult day.
Tomorrow will be better.'
-Mr. Slinger
Source: Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse
