Variant: To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
Source: The Fire Next Time
Source: Das Gewicht der Welt [The Weight of the World], p. 7
Source: All the King's Men (1946)
“The past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.”
Short story, 'Aquifer' - p.53
Short stories, The Turning (2004)
Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 1, Dead Stars, p. 3.
Theodore Roosevelt's introduction to "The Writings and Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Volume One, Constitutional Edition" http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/2/5/3253/3253-h/files/2653/2653-h/2653-h.htm#2H_4_0002, edited by Arthur Brooks Lapsley and released as "The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Volume One, by Abraham Lincoln" by Project Gutenberg on July 4, 2009. Roosevelt wrote his introduction at Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, New York, September 22, 1905 according to the introduction.
1900s
Context: It is a very poor thing, whether for nations or individuals, to advance the history of great deeds done in the past as an excuse for doing poorly in the present; but it is an excellent thing to study the history of the great deeds of the past, and of the great men who did them, with an earnest desire to profit thereby so as to render better service in the present. In their essentials, the men of the present day are much like the men of the past, and the live issues of the present can be faced to better advantage by men who have in good faith studied how the leaders of the nation faced the dead issues of the past. Such a study of Lincoln's life will enable us to avoid the twin gulfs of immorality and inefficiency—the gulfs which always lie one on each side of the careers alike of man and of nation. It helps nothing to have avoided one if shipwreck is encountered in the other. The fanatic, the well-meaning moralist of unbalanced mind, the parlor critic who condemns others but has no power himself to do good and but little power to do ill—all these were as alien to Lincoln as the vicious and unpatriotic themselves. His life teaches our people that they must act with wisdom, because otherwise adherence to right will be mere sound and fury without substance; and that they must also act high-mindedly, or else what seems to be wisdom will in the end turn out to be the most destructive kind of folly.
On the cyclical nature of American history in “A Japanese Family Relies on Mexican Neighbors in Luis Valdez's Valley of the Heart” https://www.theatermania.com/los-angeles-theater/news/a-japanese-family-relies-on-mexican-neighbors-to-s_86969.html in Theater Mania (2018 Nov 7)
