As quoted in "Diderot" in The Great Infidels (1881) by Robert Green Ingersoll; The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll Vol. III (1900), p. 367
Context: The more man ascends through the past, and the more he launches into the future, the greater he will be, and all these philosophers and ministers and truth-telling men who have fallen victims to the stupidity of nations, the atrocities of priests, the fury of tyrants, what consolation was left for them in death? This: That prejudice would pass, and that posterity would pour out the vial of ignominy upon their enemies. O Posterity! Holy and sacred stay of the unhappy and the oppressed; thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who findest the good man, who unmaskest the hypocrite, who breakest down the tyrant, may thy sure faith, thy consoling faith never, never abandon me!
“More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.”
Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic
Acceptance speech for the 1970 National Medal for Literature, New York, New York (2 December 1970)
Robert Louis Stevenson book The Silverado Squatters
Toils And Pleasures.
The Silverado Squatters (1883)
“A man is only a mature boy. The theatre widens as he ascends.”
David Jewett Waller, Sr. (1815–1893) Pennsylvanian minister and civic leader
September 20, 1870, as attributed in Preacher, Entrepreneur: Rev. D.J. Waller Sr. by William M. Ballie (2011)
E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer
"Coon Tree," The New Yorker (14 June 1956), The Points of My Compass: Letters from the East, the West, the North, the South (1962); reprinted in Essays of E.B. White (1977)
“A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.”
André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Thinking
“The future is more beautiful than all the pasts.”
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest
Letter (5 September 1919), in The Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest 1914–1919
