Futurists Quotes

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. ~ Jamais Cascio

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

2001's production notes contain a number of startlingly prescient glimpses of the world we live in today. As of mid-1965, approximately the same time that the US Department of Defense was conceiving of the internet's direct predecessor, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), Kubrick's intrepid band of futurists had seemingly already visualized important aspects of the new technology's implications. One document sent from Tony Masters to Roger Caras on June 29 listed matter-of-factly - under a letterhead replete with the roaring MGM lion - nine props that he asked Caras to help him with. Number one was "2001 newspaper to be read on some kind of television screen. Should be designed television screen shape; i.e., wider than it is high. ~ Michael Benson

Technologists and futurists call the mashup of digital info and physical space 'blended reality.' ~ Jamais Cascio

The Cubists' belief in progress was by no means complacent. They saw the new products, the new inventions, the new forms of energy, as weapons with which to demolish the old order. Yet at the same time their interest was profound and not simply declamatory. In this they differed fundamentally from the Futurists. The Futurists saw the machine as a savage god with which they identified themselves. Ideologically they were precursors of fascism: artistically they produced a vulgar form of animated naturalism, which was itself only a gloss on what had already been done in films. 35 Carlo Carra. The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli. 1911 The Cubists felt their way, picture by picture, towards a new synthesis which, in terms of painting, was the philosophical equivalent of the revolution that was taking place in scientific thinking: a revolution which was also dependent on the new materials and the new means of production. ~ John Berger

It's too late to leave the future to the futurists. ~ Sherry Turkle

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

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. ~ Edward Tenner

For their optimism, these few spent years being disparaged as futurists, as impractical dreamers, as kids playing in a sandbox - until suddenly, in the fall of 2015 and the spring of 2016, the industry recognized that the future the visionaries described wasn't just possible. It was practical and desirable, and coming sooner than anyone might have ever thought. ~ Lawrence Burns

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. ~ Kevin Kelly

Logic, order, truth, reason, we consign them all to the oblivion of death," said one Surrealist manifesto. We must "cultivate the hatred of intelligence," said the leader of the Futurists, Filippo Marinetti, an artist hailed by Mussolini as the John the Baptist of Fascism.17 ~ Leonard Peikoff

«Look, Brixie, I may dress like a nerd, but I can read trends. Yeah, I can tell you what to do.» ~ Bruce Sterling

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

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

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

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. ~ Jodie Foster

It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses. ~ Cory Doctorow

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. ~ Kenneth Goldsmith

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

There were others of course - The Velvet Undergound, the Doors- who took risks in the 1960s, when no one knew where any of it was going. Before them were the Beats and before the Beats the avant-garde artists, the futurists, Fluxus, and before that, the blues, outsider music, a mourning for what's expected but will never happen, so why not dance and play and forget for a few moments that we're all alone anyway? ~ Kim Gordon

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

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. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

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

In a certain sense I could agree with the Futurists that war is the only hygiene of the world, except for one little correction: It would be, if only volunteers were allowed to wage it. ~ Umberto Eco

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

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. ~ Jeffrey Deitch