Future Orientation Quotes

Americans look foward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors.

I don't do a lot of looking back; I tend to look ahead.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love, but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday.

While you have a future do not live too much in contemplation of your past: unless you are content to walk backward the mirror is a poor guide.

I look three to five years ahead, not 10 years behind.

He that will not look forward must look behind.

Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.

Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.

I think looking forward will be better than looking back.

I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study him.

I don't like to look back, and I'm always worried about the next thing rather than resting on the laurels or the degradations of the last thing.

I am the type of guy that always looks into the future. But, of course, you never completely forget a javelin in your shoulder.

I have to think about the future because, not that I'm bored with it now, but I can't live now, it's not my place to live now. I've got to live ahead of myself.

Elections are about the future and not about the past.

I'm totally not a nostalgic person. I always look to the future and as much as I've enjoyed the ride until now and the different phases, I'm more excited about the next music.

A leader has the capacity of vision, the ability to see where things are headed before people in general see those things.

New approaches are needed, new orientations in both thought and action. We must make the transition to a new civilization...We are talking of a transition toward a new civilization. No one knows what it will be like. What is important is to orient in that direction... I am convinced that a new civilization will inevitably take on certain features that are characteristic of, or inherent in, the socialist ideal.

Pedagogy must be oriented not to the yesterday, but to the tomorrow of the child's development. Only then can it call to life in the process of education those processes of development which now lie in the zone of proximal development

I've always been the sort of person who likes to look forward and live in the present.

While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.

I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back.

If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotized by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change.

The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.

We have to define American patriotism as future-oriented.