John Sladek Quotes

One can't help but be a bit melancholy when you see how the world has changed, and I don't mean that nostalgically.

The future is now.

Regardless of politics, our world will continue to change rapidly.

Let's forget a little about the 19th century and start looking at the 21st century.

People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.

When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?

As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future.

The world has changed profoundly since our programs were first established.

If you look through the century, certain things have gotten better and certain things have gotten worse. I wouldn't say overall that things have gotten better. I think you could say things have gotten worse, but I don't think you could say that things have gotten better. Overall. You can't say that.

There’s a big difference between history and the future.

Give us 20 years, and you'll not recognize this country!

Too much we have lived in our history. We must live in the future.

Events have moved on, yet some people still keep talking about the past.

Never has the future become so rapidly the past.

We’ve had plenty of populist figures in our past, but they had a different degree of substance than Mr. Trump. William Jennings Bryan [the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, 1900 and 1908] came out of a period like today. The industrial revolution was like our tech revolution and globalization. The pace of life had sped up and made people anxious. Telegrams and telephones were fast. Immigration was huge. And Bryan’s supporters, like Trump’s, were fearful about the way the country was changing.

Distance is collapsing in our world. People all over the world are having difficulty imagining their future, and their governments just tell them about the virtues of the past.

When you're changing centuries, people get curious about the future.

I think there is some kind of disillusionment in the West about the gains of modernity and of economic growth and it takes a form of skepticism about the gains of prosperity generally.

While I can't tell you what people are going to do for work 100 years from now, the future doesn't hinge on my imagination.

Science is progressing at such a rapid rate that when you make a prediction and think you are ahead of your time by 100 years you may be ahead of your time by 10 at most.

For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

You know that clicker? It's going to change the world more than any other thing.

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.

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