Top 15 Fred Polak Quotes

The brain attempts to recognize this odor image by scanning and resolving it into previously stored patterns

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...

Utopism is the forerunner of all modem conceptions concerning social policy, social organization, and social peace. All the art of social engineering could not place one stone upon another in the social edifice if the broad outlines of the system as an idea had not been projected long before, and if the seeds of the motivating ideals had not early been sowed in the hearts of men.

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.

The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society's image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive.

Awareness of ideal values is the first step in the conscious creation of images of the future... for a value is by definition that which guides a ‘valued’ future.

Values, means and ends... [that drive this process in current societies; mean that we now] stagger under the double load of not only having to construct (his) own future but having to create the values that will determine its design.

Once he (man) became conscious of creating images of the future, he became a participant in the process of creating this future.

Social change will be viewed as a push-pull process in which a Society is at once pulled forward by its own magnetic images of an idealized future and pushed from behind by its realized past.

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.

All kinds of separate, fragmented portions of the jigsaw puzzle are of little avail, unless they are fitted together in the best possible way, to form an image of the future depicting a number of main areas of development.

:(10) All objectives meet in the endlessly continued approach to and progress towards the ideal “summum bonum”, though this, the most valuable humanistic good of a full human society, may perhaps never be capable of realization in total perfection.

:(9) The effectiveness to be aimed at calls for the application and refinement of all conceivable prognostic techniques for adding to knowledge of the future, including those which can be effectively developed over an ever-wider time scale...

:(8) Optimum realization aims at a harmonious synthesis of effectiveness and justice in the furthest possible surveyable part of future time;

:(7) 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;