Futurist Quotes

Use of paper has continued to soar. It is as though paper is taking its revenge on the futurists - not that any futurist has ever lost business because of a wrong prediction.

This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn't mean we can get there from here.

Futurists don't consider overpopulation one of the issues of the future. They consider it the issue of the future.

I hardly see myself as a futurist.

Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality.

I never quite trust futurists because I think they're kind of telling us what they think our future should be.

The Futurists?.... Well, of course, they are already past.

Opinions are very dangerous, because they aren't based on scientific studies.

It's hard in a monetary system to trust people.

I don't like the word 'futurists.' I think we should be 'nowists.'

We have the technology to build a global paradise on earth, and at the same time, we have the power to end life as we know it.  I am a futurist.  I cannot predict the actual future - only what it can be if we manage the earth and its resources intelligently.

We are not taught to be thinkers, but reflectors of our culture. Let's teach our children to be thinkers.

There are lots of futurists that spend their whole life trying to figure out who we're going to be in 40, 50, 60, 100 years. That's the great thing about science fiction.

One thing the futurists never get right, though, is that the extreme desire for polyester only lasted a brief period in the '70s!

Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor.

I see stuff from the future, and I'm such a futurist that I have to slow down and talk in the present.

Most of us who work as professional futurists never really stop gathering information - you never know when a provocative, potentially disruptive new development might appear.

It’s your own expectations that hurt you. Not the world you live in. Whatever happens in the world is real. What you think should happen is unreal. So people are hurt by their expectations. You know , you’re not disappointed by the world, you are disappointed by your own projections.

At the crowded Costanzi Theater in Rome, while I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming Futurist music,1 together with my Futurist friends Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Soffici, Papini, and Cavacchioli, there came to my mind the idea of a new art, one that only you can create: the Art of Noises, a logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.

I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.

If you make people uniform, you can control them. If you teach people to read, and think, and question things, you lose control. So, the best idea is to separate people if you wish to maintain a monetary system. It's called divide and conquer. By dividing people, they're not a threat, you can control them.

I'm a futurist. Technology is our way out of almost every problem we have. Technology can create a new sense of community.

Futurists and common sense concur that a substantial change, worldwide, in life style and moral guidelines will soon become an absolute necessity.

When we talk of architecture, people usually think of something static; this is wrong. What we are thinking of is an architecture similar to the dynamic and musical architecture achieved by the Futurist musician Pratella. Architecture is found in the movement of colours, of smoke from a chimney and in metallic structures, when they are expressed in states of mind which are violent and chaotic.

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

Everyone complains that we can no longer intake huge chunks of text. I find that a reason to celebrate. It's something that has deep roots in modernism, stretching from the Futurists' use of typography to Pound's use of ideograms to concrete poetry.

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

While I talked about comparisons between Cap and Cable, there's also a parallel with Tony Stark. Iron Man thinks of himself as a 'futurist,' Cable is from the future. Both have been at war with their own bodies. We look for characters with touch points to Cable. Their legacy means an enormous amount to him.

Many futurists use a checklist approach to make sure they're covering a sufficiently wide set of topics in terms of both research and brainstorming during a foresight exercise.

So, "normal" is really what society dictates as normal and if we're born in that world, we would see that as normal. But if you think about it for a second, is it really?

It should also be born in mind that the research on 'movement' and the dynamic outlook on the world, which were the basis of Futurist theory, in no way required one to paint nothing but speeding cars or ballerinas in action; for a person who is seated, or an inanimate object, though apparently static, could be considered dynamically and suggest dynamic forms. I may mention as an example the 'Portrait of Madame S.' (1912) and the 'Seated Woman' (1914).

Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism, Communism, the Free-Market .... What good are these approaches for? These attempts are made by men who are cerebral insufficient. I'm trying to give you back your brain, which they took away from you in schools and in your upbringing. I'm trying to show you how the world works. So if you want a better world, you have to get up off your ass and make it better

In the early days the Cubism' method of grasping an object was to go round and round it. The Futurists declared that one had to get inside it. In my opinion the two views can be reconciled in a poetic cognition of the world. But to the very fact that they appealed to the creative depths in the painter by awakening in him hidden forces which were intuitive and vitalizing, the Futurist theories did more than the Cubist principles to open up unexplored and boundless horizons.

Futurists are already predicting the day mankind builds its replacement, Artificial Intelligence. Daniel Wilson shows what might happen when that computer realizes its creators are no longer needed. Lean prose, great characters, and almost unbearable tension ensure that Robopocalypse is going to be a blockbuster. Once started I defy anyone to put it down.

New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought.

If you had a free society you couldn't get people to go to war, if you had an intelligent type of upbringing in ones children. They would say; There must be many other ways of solving problems other then killing people.

I don't like speed. I would have made a terrible Futurist. Even when I did take drugs, I never liked amphetamines and much preferred the slow taffy-pull of time that you get with opiates.

Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor. Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.

You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

To the Young Artists of Italy! The cry of rebellion that we launch, linking our ideals with those of the Futurist poets, does not originate in an aesthetic clique. It expresses the violent desire that stirs in the veins of every creative artist today.

O my brother Futurists ! All of you, look at yourselves! In the name of that Human Pride we so adore, I proclaim that the hour is nigh when men with broad temples and steel chins will give birth magnificently, with a single trust of their bulging will, to giants with flawless gestures.

The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

We live in a world where our social system is old, our language is old, the way we acquire goods and services is outdated, our cities are detrimental to our health, chaotic and a tremendous waste of resource, and most of all our politics and values no longer serve us.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

I started getting really curious about art. I read about the Dadaists and the Futurists and the Constructivists - those kind of movements which were reflecting the angst of the people of their times. Their work was trying to lead a movement. I began thinking about what was happening, with painting on the streets and painting on the trains as being similar but also coming from a real, pure space. It wasn't being created by academies. It was a spontaneous combustion of ideas that just happened.

Crime is based upon need, making money.  People sell drugs to make money.  But if everybody is cared for, they don't sell drugs and if there's no money you can't sell drugs even if you wanted to.  There'd be no such thing as gambling, prostitution, or selling out, or paying off a senator or a governor.  There are no senators, there are no governors so you can't pay them off.  If you take away the basis or the condition that generate abhorrent behavior, you don't have abhorrent behavior.

I was an avid reader of futurists during the 1970s and '80s. They were so wrong - about everything.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.