Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold. Blindly planning for it, envisioning things that weren't the case. This was the working of the will. This was what gave the world purpose and direction. Not what was there but what was not.

One way to pick a future is to believe it’s inevitable.

People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.

Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists.

People want to follow someone who is driven by his or her future truth.

People in this town saw only what they'd all agreed to see, they believed what was on the tube or in the morning papers half of them read while they were driving to work on the freeway, and it was all their dream about being wised up, about the truth setting them free.

The vast majority of people conform to whatever is normal for the time.

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government

During many ages, the prediction, as it is usual, contributed to its own accomplishment.

For many of us, the happiest future is one that's precisely like the past, except a little better

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

People want pretty much the same things: They wanted to be happy. Most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future, while most older people believed they lay in the past.

Most people go through life assuming that they’re right … and that people who don’t see things their way are wrong.

Most people believe almost anything they see in print.