The Future

"Those of us who are in this world to educate—to care for—young children have a special calling: a calling that has very little to do with the collection of expensive possessions but has a lot to do with the worth inside of heads and hearts. In fact, that’s our domain: the heads and hearts of the next generation, the thoughts and feelings of the future."-Fred M. Rogers

"I go to school to youth to learn the future."-Robert Frost, What Fifty Said

"The power we exert over the future behavior of our children is enormous. Even after they have left home, even after we have left the world, there will always be part of us that will remain with them forever."-Neil Kurshan

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."-Deepak Chopra

"To be motivated to sit at home and study, instead of going out and playing, children need a sense of themselves over time—they need to be able to picture themselves in the future.... If they can’t, then they’re simply reacting to daily events, responding to the needs of the moment—for pleasure, for affiliation, for acceptance."-Stanley I. Greenspan

"The decision to have a child is both a private and a public decision, for children are our collective future."-Sylvia Ann Hewlett

"If the children and youth of a nation are afforded opportunity to develop their capacities to the fullest, if they are given the knowledge to understand the world and the wisdom to change it, then the prospects for the future are bright. In contrast, a society which neglects its children, however well it may function in other respects, risks eventual disorganization and demise."-Urie Bronfenbrenner

"The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps."-Carl Sagan

"When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. Smug in our certain awareness that ... communal life must be more difficult even than nuclear family life, which we know, to our very nerve endings, is disastrous, we condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money- bitten, frightened, adult lives."-June Jordan

"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."-Eric Hoffer

"The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service, some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community—these are the most vital things education must try to produce."-Virginia Gildersleeve

"And all your future lies beneath your hat."-John Oldham Lines to a Friend About to Leave the University

"The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."-Albert Einstein

"The empires of the future are empires of the mind."-Winston Churchill

"We are the echo of the future."-W.S. Merwin