Linus Pauling — "The best way to predict the future is to create it."
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
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More from Linus Pauling
"I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: 'Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.' … The twenty-five percent is for error."
"The only difference between a good idea and a bad idea is that a good idea works."
"The human body can make a number of substances, but it cannot make vitamin C."
"I have spent a good deal of my life trying to get people to eat more vitamin C."
"The only way to cope with a problem is to go right at it, and the only way to solve a problem is to keep on working at it until you've solved it."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Instead of trying to guess what will happen, shape outcomes through deliberate action. Waiting passively for the future cedes control to circumstance. Real power lies in making choices, building structures, and pursuing goals that actively define what comes next. The future isn't a fixed destination discovered through analysis — it's a construction site, and those who build with intention determine where things end up rather than merely reacting to where they arrive.
Relevance to Linus Pauling
Pauling embodied this across two domains. In chemistry, he didn't wait for molecular structures to reveal themselves — he devised quantum mechanical models that explained chemical bonding before instruments could confirm it. In politics, he refused to accept nuclear catastrophe as inevitable, organizing thousands of scientists into the 1958 Pauling Petition that pressured the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Two Nobel Prizes, two entirely different futures he chose to build rather than predict.
The era
The mid-20th century made civilizational collapse feel probable, not theoretical. The US-Soviet arms race accelerated after the 1949 Soviet nuclear test and the 1952 hydrogen bomb. McCarthyism punished those who challenged the trajectory — Pauling's passport was revoked for years. Amid pervasive Cold War fatalism, a generation of activist scientists argued that human agency, not geopolitical momentum, would decide survival. The emerging UN framework and test-ban movement were direct assertions that intentional action could redirect history.
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