“As for the world’s future, I am not so discouraged as many are. Granted that the old, easygoing optimism is impossible!…Nevertheless at threescore years and eighteen I find this generation the most stimulating, exciting, provocative – yes, promising – era I have ever seen or read about. I am not yet ready to die. I can’t wait to see what is going to happen next.

“Like the French editor, carried in a cart through the streets of Paris to the guillotine, I would say: ‘It is too bad to cut my head off. I want to see how all this is going to turn out.’ Prophetic creative ideas are here; there are open doors of possibility for good as well as evil, which did not exist when I was born; and though I am an old man, I share at least a little the hopeful spirit of the young, facing life, as the poet, Lowell, sang, with the ‘rays of morning on their white shields of expectation.’”

–from a 1956 sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of Riverside Church, New York City.

You’ll find more uplifting Fosdick quotes here.