Peter Drucker Quotes

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

We can't predict the future.

Five hundred years before Christ was born, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus told his students that "everything changes except the law of change". He said: "You cannot step in the same river twice." The river changes every second; and so does the man who stepped in it. Life is a ceaseless change. The only certainty is today. Why mar the beauty of living today by trying to solve the problems of a future that is shrouded in ceaseless change and uncertainty-a future that no one can possibly foretell?

It's impossible for us to forecast what's going to happen ten years from now and make a decision today to say what we're going to do.

People often say that it is easier to predict the way things are going to be 10 to 20 years in the future than to predict how it is going to be 3 years from now.

We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for thy can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.

Even people capable of living in the past don't really know what the future holds.

To understand the difficulty of predicting the next 100 years, we have to appreciate the difficulty that the people of 1900 had in predicting the world of 2000.

The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.

I don't know what will happen 100 years from now.

You can't keep wanting to be 20 years old. Everybody knows that, but what's in the next room?

Science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe.

People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong.

progress, whatever your definition of it, is not inevitable.

I didn't know what we would be selling in the year 2000 but whatever it was we would be selling the most of it.

What if we knew what tomorrow would bring? Would we fix it? Could we?

Perhaps the safest prediction we can make about the future is that it will surprise us.

While we flatter ourselves that things remain the same, they are changing under our very eyes from year to year, from day to day.

The assumption of time is one of humanity's greatest follies. We tell ourselves that there's always tomorrow, when we can no more predict tomorrow than we can the weather. Procrastination is the thief of dreams.

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

There's nothing as scary as the future.

By tomorrow at this time, I think you're going to have a much better idea of what crazy is. -- Ev Hillman

It's tough to say, exactly, what things will look like in three to five years, but there's a lot of work to do in just moving along the path that we've already set out.

I know who I am, how I was. I don't want to know how I will be because nobody knows that.

When I look at efforts to create change in big companies over the past 10 years, I have to say that there's enough evidence of success to say that change is possible - and enough evidence of failure to say that it isn't likely. Both of those lessons are important.