“Why did I pick on the next nine years instead of the next 900 for finding a solution to the population crisis? One answer is that the world is rapidly running out of food. And famine, of course, could be one way to reach a death rate solution to the population problem. In fact, the battle to feed humanity is already lost, in the sense that we will not be able to prevent large famines in the next decade or so.”

“In twenty years, the USSR will be producing almost twice as much industrial output as is now produced in the entire non socialist world.”

“At present weapons are being changed every ten years, and even more frequently. In another fifteen years or so, people will use for shooting not rifles but some kind of lightning, some sort of a machine emitting a holocaustal electrical stream. Tell me: what can we invent in this line so as to surprise our neighbors? What if in fifteen years every great power will have secretly stored away one such surprise for any kind of eventuality? Alas, we are merely capable of imitating and purchasing ammunition from others, and—at best—of repairing it at home. To invent such machines we should have to have our own independent, and not purchased, science, not an imported but a free one—one that has taken root in our soil. As yet we do not possess such a science, nor do we even have a purchased one.”

“Once we recognise this with all the clearness that the clearness of the fact itself demands we must then rise up against the 19th century. If it is evident that there was in it something extraordinary and incomparable, it is no less so that it must have suffered from certain radical vices, certain constitutional defects, when it brought into being a caste of men- the mass-man in revolt who are placing in imminent danger those very principles to which they owe their existence. If that human type continues to be master in Europe, thirty years will suffice to send our continent back to barbarism. Legislative and industrial technique will disappear with the same facility with which so many trade secrets have often disappeared.”

“I pour my crisis regarding democratic thinking and universal feeling onto paper because not I alone—know this—not I alone, if not today, then in ten years, will be assailed by the desire to have a clearly delineated world and a clearly delineated God. Prophecy: democracy, universality, equality, will not be capable of satisfying you. Your desire for duality will grow stronger and stronger—a desire for a dual world—dual thinking—dual mythology—in the future we will be paying homage to two different systems simultaneously and a magic world will find a place for itself next to a rational one.”

“So, one after another, either as pilots or passengers, will the members of the club ascend; and before the sheds are closed and the aerodrome deserted, each and all will have soared in flight, and tasted that thrill and exultation which comes of a rush in a plane through the cool of the evening air. But today, if we try to grasp such a notion as this, our state of mind is very like that of our grandfathers had some prophet dared tell them the day would dawn when, seated comfortably at dinner in a car on wheels, men would be drawn by an engine at 60 miles an hour: and yet the man or woman who has not, say twenty years hence, made a journey through the air, will be in exactly the same position as one who, at the present time, has never been by train.”

“We will start to see some forms of robot sex appearing in high-income, very wealthy households as soon as 2025.”

“Two or three years ago, it appeared that automatic recognition of sizeable vocabularies would not be achieved for ten or fifteen years; that it would have to await much further, gradual accumulation of knowledge of acoustic, phonetic, linguistic, and psychological processes in speech communication. Now, however, many see a prospect of accelerating the acquisition of that knowledge with the aid of computer processing of speech signals, and not a few workers have the feeling that sophisticated computer programs will be able to perform well as speech-pattern recognizers even without the aid of much substantive knowledge of speech signals and processes. Putting those two considerations together brings the estimate of the time required to achieve practically significant speech recognition down to perhaps five years, the five years just mentioned.”

“After sixty years of devoted service, Moore's Law will die a dignified death no later than the year 2019. By that time, transistor features will be just a few atoms in width, and the strategy of ever finer photolithography will have run its course.”

“These societies, these generations which no longer expect anything from some future 'coming', and have less and less confidence in history, which dig in behind their futuristic technologies, behind their stores of information and inside the beehive networks of communication where time is at last wiped out by pure circulation, will perhaps never reawaken. But they do not know that. The year 2000 will not perhaps take place. But they do not know that.”

“Dismisssing the Italian or Continental look of the 1950’s (Italy is third in Cardin sales, France first, England second), [Pierre] Cardin had three words for men’s fashions in his own lifetime: 'There were none. When I presented my line, there were only the eccentricities of youth.' And the future of men’s fashions? Cardin: 'I’m creating them now.' In the year 2,000? 'I’ll be dead.'”

“The Great War had been the explosion of a vast accumulation of energy, moral and social as well as material. Europe might, and probably would, bicker, murder, bomb, massacre, and starve, but for another generation at least she would not have either the spirit or the discipline or the material to produce such munitions and such wide-sweeping concerted action as devastated her in the Great War. She is morally and physically bankrupt and prostrate. She may go on sinking, as Asia Minor sank, back even to barbarism. Even if she does not do so, it will take forty or fifty years to reassemble energy for another such world-wide outbreak.”

“Proportional access to professions or The middle way between free competition and commercial farmage. This would be a debate of the greatest importance if civilisation were to continue even for another ten years. But as that misfortune is unlikely to happen, it will be enough merely to touch on the question, and show that commerce is in danger of being subjected to farmage because of the need to remedy its increasing anarchy.”

“The hordes are making daily inroads into the cultivated areas of Asia, spilling further and further beyond their natural boundary, the Himalayan mountain range that stretches from Bokhara to China. At our very gates, the hordes are surging all over Turkey. Fifty more years of persecution from the Ottoman Empire and we shall see the whole of that fine empire returned to the life of nomads or Tartars, who are making terrifying progress against Turkish domination.”

“In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future. Citizens of the world's richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon.”

“[...] we have been expressly evolved by nature-with all our impulses and deepest instincts-for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose. Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life, the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades.”

“A few years ago London was surprised by a play called Rossum's Universal Robots. The production of such beings may well be possible within fifty years. They will not be made, but grown under glass. There seems little doubt that it will be possible to carry out in artificial surroundings the entire cycle which now leads to the birth of a child. Interference with the mental development of such beings, expert suggestion and treatment in the earlier years, would produce beings specialized to thought or toil. The production of creatures, for instance, which have admirable physical development, with their mental endowment stunted in particular directions, is almost within the range of human power. A being might be produced capable of tending a machine, but without other ambitions.”

“Closer at hand and perhaps equally decisive is another no less threatening event. This is the advent of automation, which in few decades probably will empty the factories and liberate mankind from its oldest and most natural burden, the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity. Here, too, a fundamental aspect of the human condition is at stake, but the rebellion against it, the wish to be liberated from labor's 'toil and trouble,' is not modern but as old as recorded history. Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.”

“Viewed within a multiparadigmatic framework, cognitive psychology may be the most likely of the existing schools to move psychology to the Kuhnian stage of normal science. However, the apparent emergence of the neuroscientific school allows us to question how long the cognitive school will remain dominant, and it is possible that within the next decade the two schools will directly compete for transcendence.”

“TÉLÉVISION: L'objet le plus familier au monde. En 2010, plus de deux milliards de téléviseurs seront allumés en permanence. Ce ne sera pourtant pas un facteur de cohésion ou d'uniformité, mais plutôt de différenciation.”

“There will be a great deal of synthetics, molded to fit the body, perforated for breathing. Ties will be for formal occasions. Buttons will disappear, zippers can now be invisible and they follow the body more closely. Men will be entirely in color.”

“All the same, I want to hope that if not I and not my son, then perhaps at least my grandson will see this book fully printed in our homeland...”

“Not even 25 years have passed since most of us first saw Europe with our own eyes. Before, this was impossible because of the Iron Curtain. And now the impression is forming that this curtain is falling once again.”

“A 'Great Recession' is here for ocean shipping.”

“Time: The year is 2010. There are significant technical advances, but the clothes and habits of ordinary people in the 'Donor' World are no different to those of Third World citizens today.”

“Closer at hand and perhaps equally decisive is another no less threatening event. This is the advent of automation, which in few decades probably will empty the factories and liberate mankind from its oldest and most natural burden, the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity. Here, too, a fundamental aspect of the human condition is at stake, but the rebellion against it, the wish to be liberated from labor's 'toil and trouble,' is not modern but as old as recorded history. Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.”

“In the early history of our planet, when enormous amounts of organic molecules were being produced by sunlight in a hydrogen-rich atmosphere, very simple, nonparasitic organisms had a fighting chance. The first living things may have been something like free-living viroids, only a few hundred nucleotides long. Experimental work on making such creatures from scratch may begin by the end of the century. There is still much to be understood about the origin of life, including the origin of the genetic code. But we have been performing such experiments for only some thirty years. Nature has had a four-billion-year head start. All in all, we have not done badly.”

“At any time between now and the end of the century, hundreds of thousands — nay, millions — of men and women may well be confronted with problems of the kind here discussed.”