Barack Obama Quotes

I shall go further and say that even if an examination of the past could lead to any valid prediction concerning man's future, that prediction would be the contrary of reassuring.

Where we are going as a species is a big question. Human evolution certainly hasn't stopped. Every time individuals produce a new zygote, there's a reshuffling and recombination of genes. And we don't know where all of that is going to take us.

The challenge of the unknown future is so much more exciting than the stories of the accomplished past.

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

Optimism is a duty. The future is open. It is not predetermined. No one can predict it, except by chance. We all contribute to determining it by what we do. We are all equally responsible for its success.

I have seen the future, and it works.

But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.

One may say that predictions are dangerous particularly for the future. If the danger involved in a prediction is not incurred, no consequence follows and the uncertainty principle is not violated.

The realization that you can't predict the future -- and mold it -- could only come as a shock to an academic.

The primary ingredient for progress is optimism. The unwavering belief that something can be better drives the human race forward.

I think we're in a very exciting time - visually, I think we are. I've not got a crystal ball. I'm not saying I know what the future is at all. In some ways I'm getting quite pessimistic about the future, but in other ways I think it might get better. We are moving into very big changes.

I want to keep looking at ways to stride forward with positivity.

Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature.

The progress of the world will call for the best that all of us have to give.

To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.

The measure of progress of civilization is the progress of the people.

It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.

To hope is to contradict the future.

Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.

Still a dreamer, yet more of a realist than ever before, I knew this was my time to sail. On the horizon I saw the shining future, as before. The difference now was that I felt the wind at my back. I was ready.

Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world. And the urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy.

There is a subtle danger in a man thinking that he is "fixed" for life. It indicates that the next jolt of the wheel of progress is going to fling him off.

When we speak of the morrow nothing is ever certain.

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

All fear comes from trying to see the future, Biff. If you know what is coming, you aren't afraid.