“The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will.”

— David Mitchell , book Cloud Atlas

"Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery", p. 340 (Nook edition)
Cloud Atlas (2004)

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David Mitchell 68

English novelist 1969

Alfred Barr (1902–1981) American art historian

On the Museum of Modern Art, Newsweek (June 1, 1964).

“Live more and more in the Present, which is ever beautiful and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future.”

Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic

p. 5809 http://www.lordmeher.org/index.jsp?pageBase=page.jsp&nextPage=5809
Lord Meher (1986)

“The Future is more present than the Past :
For one look back, a thousand on we cast;
And hope doth ever memory outlast.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1834-1) (Vol.40) The Future, compare Ethel Churchill (or The Two Brides) I, 31
The Monthly Magazine

“They allow us access to the experience of the past—the only kind of time machine we are ever likely to have.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 18 (p. 160)

“No man ever entered the White House under the burden of a more inconvenient past. And no President was ever denounced with greater ferocity. -- said of Andrew Jackson”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Review of Andrew Jackson: An Epic in Homespun by Gerald W. Johnson http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1928mar-00382, The American Mercury, March 1928, pp. 382-383 (March 1928)
1920s

“For me, art has neither past nor future. All I have ever made was for the present.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd
Attributed from posthumous publications

“Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?”

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

“You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: Stay

“The past is not more important than the future, despite what your culture has taught you. Your future observations, conclusions, and beliefs are more important to you than those in your past ever will be. The world is changing so fast the balance between the past and the future has shifted.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Usenet signatures

“The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance — these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community.”

Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) American theoretical physicist and professor of physics

Science and the Common Understanding (1953)

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