“Determinism looks backwards to the causes of the present state, not forward to the consequences.”
Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 22 “Free Will” (p. 307)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Matt Ridley 65
economist 1958Related quotes
“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
“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
“Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward.”
Source: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay
“The further backward you look, the further forward you can see.”
In Churchill by Himself (2008), Appendix I: Red Herrings, ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 577 ISBN 1586486381; “Commonly ascribed to WSC, even by The Queen (Christmas Message, 1999). What Churchill actually said was ‘The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward’”.
The attribution of the mistaken form of the quote to Churchill dates from at least 1959 https://books.google.com/books?id=QN3hAAAAMAAJ&dq=The+farther+backward+you+look%2C+the+further+forward+you+can+see&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22backward+you+can+look%22.
Misattributed
(1964) Post-election statement. Virginia Morell, Ancestral Passions: The leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings, Copyright 1995, Chapter 19, beginning.
“You can't go forward if you're looking backward. You run into walls that way.”
Source: Bloodfever