“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.”
Golda Meir book My Life
My Life (1975), p. 231
Attributed to Orwell by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC (27 September 2006), this seems to be a paraphrase of some of the statements in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Misattributed
Source: 1984
“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.”
Golda Meir book My Life
My Life (1975), p. 231
“The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.”
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer
What Is Religion? (1899) is Ingersoll's last public address, delivered before the American Free Religious association, Boston, June 2, 1899. Source: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Dresden Memorial Edition Volume IV, pages 477-508, edited by Cliff Walker. http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/ingwhatrel.htm <br class="br">Variant: The present is the child, and the necessary child, of all the past, and the mother of all the future.
Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer
Things I Didn't Know (2006)
Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author
The Golden Man (1954)
Context: "He can look ahead. See what's coming. He can — prethink. Let's call it that. He can see into the future. Probably he doesn't perceive it as the future."
"No," Anita said thoughtfully. "It would seem like the present. He has a broader present. But his present lies ahead, not back. Our present is related to the past. Only the past is certain, to us. To him, the future is certain. And he probably doesn't remember the past, any more than any animal remembers what happened."
"As he develops," Baines said, "as his race evolves, it'll probably expand its ability to prethink. Instead of ten minutes, thirty minutes. Then an hour. A day. A year. Eventually they'll be able to keep ahead a whole lifetime. Each one of them will live in a solid, unchanging world. There'll be no variables, no uncertainty. No motion! They won't have anything to fear. Their world will be perfectly static, a solid block of matter."
"And when death comes," Anita said, "they'll accept it. There won't be any struggle; to them, it'll already have happened."
Derrick Jensen book A Language Older Than Words
A Language Older Than Words (2000)
“Telling the truth about the past helps cause justice in the present.”
James W. Loewen (1942) American historian
“Shall we never never get rid of this Past?… It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne book The House of the Seven Gables
Source: The House of the Seven Gables