“I have no intention of retaliating or looking backwards. We are going to forget the past and look forward to the future.”
(1964) Post-election statement. Virginia Morell, Ancestral Passions: The leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings, Copyright 1995, Chapter 19, beginning.
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Jomo Kenyatta 10
First prime minister and first president of Kenya 1893–1978Related quotes

Context: It seems impossible to believe that Life, so rare a fruit of the universe, intelligent Life, conscious Life, to which the long course of evolution has been so manifestly leading up all through the long ages, should have no better destiny than a final and hopeless extinction; that this Earth and all the efforts and aspirations of the long generations of men should have no worthier end than to swing, throughout the eternal ages, an empty, frozen heap of dust, circling round the extinct cinder that was once its Sun. If we look backward, we seem to discern clear signs of progress; if we look forward, we discern nothing but the veil. Science is but organized experience, and experience of the future we have none.

“I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.”
15 January, 1849. As quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell The life of Charlotte Brontë (1870), p. 285

Often quoted as "Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.", e.g, Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 112.
Faith for Living (1940)

“You can't go forward if you're looking backward. You run into walls that way.”
Source: Bloodfever

“And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope.”
"The Death of the Hired Man" (1914)
1910s
Variant: And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.

“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”
Volume iii, p. 274
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
“I'd rather look forward and dream, than look backward and regret.”
Source: Unfinished Business: What the Dead Can Teach Us About Life