“One cannot say that it will never happen again, or that it cannot happen.”
William Pfaff (1928–2015) American journalist
Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 4, The Soviet Union, p. 107.
“What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.”
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl
Last update Oct. 4, 2025. History
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Do you have more details about the quote "What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again." by Anne Frank?
Anne Frank110
victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary 1929–1945Related quotes
Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer
A New Earth (2005)
Variant: Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now, and if the past cant prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Sarah Monette book The Goblin Emperor
Source: The Goblin Emperor (2014), Chapter 22, "The Bridge over the Upazhera" (p. 275)
“One cannot prevent people from thinking what they please.”
Friedrich Schiller Mary Stuart
Man kann den Menschen nicht verwehren, Zu denken, was sie wollen.
Maria Stuart, Act I, sc. viii (1800)
Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician
"Notes about Music" (29 March 1946) http://web.archive.org/19991001055247/www.geocities.com/Nashville/3448/music.html also quoted in A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen (2000) by Bryan K. Garman, p. 244 <br class="br">Context: I have hoped as many hopes and dreamed so many dreams, seen them swept aside by weather, and blown away by men, washed away in my own mistakes, that — I use to wonder if it wouldn't be better just to haul off and quit hoping. Just protect my own inner brain, my own mind and heart, by drawing it up into a hard knot, and not having any more hopes or dreams at all. Pull in my feelings, and call back all of my sentiments — and not let any earthly event move me in either direction, either cause me to hate, to fear, to love, to care, to take sides, to argue the matter at all — and, yet … there are certain good times, and pleasures that I never can forget, no matter how much I want to, because the pleasures, and the displeasures, the good times and the bad, are really all there is to me.<br>And these pleasures that you cannot ever forget are the yeast that always starts working in your mind again, and it gets in your thoughts again, and in your eyes again, and then, all at once, no matter what has happened to you, you are building a brand new world again, based and built on the mistakes, the wreck, the hard luck and trouble of the old one.
