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The unbearableness of the future is easier to face than that of the present if only because human foresight is much more destructive than anything that the future can bring about.

I have one good characteristic: I'm a pessimist, so I always imagine the worst - always. To me, the future is a black hole.

When thinking about the future, it is fashionable to be pessimistic. Yet the evidence unequivocally belies such pessimism. Over the past centuries, humanity's lot has improved dramatically - in the developed world, where it is rather obvious, but also in the developing world, where life expectancy has more than doubled in the past 100 years.

One of the primary reasons why the human brain has evolved to look so far into the future is so that we can take actions in the present that will bring us to a better future rather than a worse one.

You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.

Humans are terrible at predicting the future. We really overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term... If we can glimpse even a couple of years into the future, even that's difficult to do.

I never think of the future. I never imagine what comes next.

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.