Compass Quote by Sybille Bedford

“Yet it is unassailably true that so long as we lack omniscience and do not know all of the future, all our generalizations are…

— Morris F. Cohen

The persistence of erroneous beliefs exacerbates the widespread anachronistic failure to recognize the urgent problems that face humanity on this planet.

— Murray Gell-Mann

With a historical setting, I worry about accuracy at every turn... With a created world, I have to worry about all of it holding…

— David B. Coe

It is a very great mistake, and a very common one, even for well-read persons, to adopt the idea that the progress of the…

— Samuel Freeman Miller

This society believed it was looking towards a new future, yet we consistently find ourselves being dragged backwards.

— David Ervine

“When comparing 100 years of experience to 1, there is a way to close the gap. One must simply understand the choices that were…

— Lionel Suggs

Two-thirds of a century after [The Road to Serfdom] got written, hindsight confirms how inaccurate its innuendo about the future turned out to be.

— Paul Samuelson

We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately "create the future of mankind." This is the final conclusion of the forty years which…

— Friedrich August von Hayek

We must shed the illusion that we can deliberately 'create the future of mankind'

— Friedrich August von Hayek

“Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no…

— Alberto Manguel

Humankind's constant effort to fix its shortcomings is what drives human history.

— Joel Garreau

“Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!”

— Joyce Carol Oates