“Where were you last night?” Yvonne asks Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, in Casablanca. “That’s so long ago, I don’t remember.” Her follow-up: “Will I see you tonight?” To which he replies, “I never make plans that far ahead.”

According to Dignitas, an end-of-life clinic located in Switzerland, 70 percent of people who begin the formal process of assisted suicide do not go through with it.

Responding to William F. Buckley’s question as to whether or not he was free the last week in June 1975, the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith said, “That week I’ll be teaching at the University of Moscow.” Buckley replied, “Oh? What do you have left to teach them?”

“Why is life a perpetual preparation for something that never happens?” W.B. Yeats asked in his journal, September 16, 1909.

By the end of the century, a report by the National Science Foundation in 1982 predicted, 40 percent of American homes will have “two videotex service”—a term describing the emergent conjunction of communications and computing. A U.S. Census report found in 2000 that 42 percent of American homes used the Internet. The first year the census started tracking U.S. computer usage was 1984.