William Irwin Thompson Quotes

It is a paradox that in our time of drastic rapid change, when the future is in our midst devouring the present before our eyes, we have never been less certain about what is ahead of us.

Life is never what it seems - and that’s the great thing about it

The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

It's a very confusing era that we're in.

The Chinese say, 'It's good to live in interesting times.'

Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.

I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.

When you walk out of your house in the morning, you don't know what you're going to see.

It's an odd world.

History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical.

The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things.

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

In politics the future is never a straight line projection of the present.

History is totally unpredictable.

Predictions are so often, so wrong ... The future is just too complicated.

The major problem for us in the 21st century is to be comfortable with ambiguity.

We live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.

The world is unpredictable.

The world that we live in isn't uniform-looking, and the future that we're headed toward isn't uniform-looking.

We simply have never been able to predict what our next challenge will be.