Influence

A thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs.

Mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue & senility.

Most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books — no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930.

Tornadoes, floods, droughts, lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal tendency known in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancing off with other men.

And, most fatally & abysmally, men of superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be called Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots, Little Brothers of the Poor, or any other rosy name, would continue to have more influence than slower-witted men, however worthy.

It Can’t Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis