"The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. The image of the future can act not only as a barometer, but as a regulative mechanism which alternately opens and shuts the dampers on the mighty blast-furnace of culture. It not only indicates alternative choices and possibilities, but actively promotes certain choices and in effect puts them to work in determining the future. A close examination of prevailing images, then, puts us in a position to forecast the probable future. Any culture which finds itself in the condition of our present culture, turning aside from its own heritage of positive visions of the future, or actively at work in changing these positive visions into negative ones, has no future..."

“: Thought models, or models of the future, are useful insofar as they can reasonably contribute towards the optimum realization of man’s future-directed wishes and actions in a given situation or period;”

“As the reader is aware, at the cradle of our learning stood the philosophy of Asia Minor and Greece, itself influenced in turn by Indian and Oriental philosophical and religious conceptions. It is the tragedy of this philosophy that, although it was traditionally directed towards the undogmatic acquisition of wisdom and virtue, always regarding the freedom of human rational thought in visionary fashion as the highest good, it nevertheless inevitably led to a mental hardening of the arteries into coercive thought models.”

“Optimum realization aims at a harmonious synthesis of effectiveness and justice in the furthest possible surveyable part of future time;”

“: For this purpose everyone, choosing in complete freedom and on his own responsibility, must be able and permitted to utilize all the philosophical and scientific thought models useful for this vital choice;”

“The trends in modem technology reveal most clearly the contrasting modes of development in thinking about the future. Technology offers an unprecedented confirmation of the possibilities of the utopia, often far exceeding the utopian fantasies in its concrete achievements. Through technology, Homo sapiens can transform ail things; at last man appears to be master of his own fate.”

“Every great thinker who has concerned himself with the historical process has speculated about the meaning of time and its flow in history. Marx, Hegel, Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin, each with his own variation on the theme of time-flow as mechanically patterned fluctuation, predict the future but ignore its dynamic interaction with the past and the present.”