Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.

Every day I make predictions that don't come anywhere close to the mark.

We should all be involved in the avant-garde as long as we look toward the past.

Men may know many things by seeing; but no prophet can see before the event, nor what end waits for him.

Being a visionary is a new profession, but it is really just a variant on fortunetelling, which may be the world's oldest. And its marketing appeal is similar - people will pay for reassurance about the unknown.

[Explaining a failed policy:] Our crystal ball was very muddy.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable.

We futurists have a magic button. We follow every statement about a failed forecast with 'yet.'

Knowing the future is difficult, controlling the future is impossible. Knowing today is essential; controlling today is possible.

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

You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it.

Forecasting is very difficult, especially when it involves the future.

By the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached.

We were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders that we were creating the 21st century in 1971. That was the idea. And we wanted to just blast everything in the past, rather like the vorticists did at the beginning of the century in the Britain or the dadaists did Europe, you know. It was the same sensibility of everything is rubbish, and all rubbish is wonderful.

People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it.

Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says, "What if?" not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere - flying, space travel, but even there we missed badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.

Avant-garde means never having to say you're sorry.

Fashion goes in only one direction -forward- and I am a firm believer in thinking that way too.

As a producer, it starts when I talk about privacy and silence. It starts before anybody believes in it. And I think that's, you have to have a real sense of self, and in order to push things through. And so often, what's interesting, is how many people dismiss an idea that eventually everybody [gloms] onto. So to me it's, that's what I mean by hard.

In contemporary art or movies, it makes perfect sense to be focused on the bleeding edge, on the new idea that's never been previously contemplated. But when we're discussing our goals, our passion and the way we interact with the culture, it seems to me that what works is significantly more important than what's new.

There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them.

All the skills which I have acquired during my sociological life allow me to diagnose and explain what is going on, but not to predict what will happen.

No one ever thinks about what the hell is going to happen 25 years from now.

If we knew what comes next, we never would have worried.

While we may open the books of the past, we may but grant flying glances of the future, through the mist that veils it.