The debt-ceiling vote isn't about what will be done in the future it is about the integrity of America's commitment to support the bonds we issue. Elected officials have an obligation to maintain that integrity regardless of whether they voted for the programs that required the borrowing in the first place.

When I was a kid I thought movie stars were women and men who were in these great films that we still look at now. But I don't think there are too many films coming out these days that we're going to look at in the future and say 'This is one of the great ones.'

The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options as we have in the past.

At this early stage in our evolution now through our infancy and into our childhood and then with luck our growing up what our species needs most of all right now is simply a future.

Doctors dressed up in one professional costume or another have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is hard to think of a more dependable or enduring occupation harder still to imagine any future events leading to its extinction.

We are perhaps uniquely among the earth's creatures the worrying animal. We worry away our lives fearing the future discontent with the present unable to take in the idea of dying unable to sit still.

What else does anxiety about the future bring you but sorrow upon sorrow?

There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.

When a scientist is ahead of his times it is often through misunderstanding of current rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day from some perspective appear prophetic.

When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s you're making a mistake.