Quotes about the past (4316 quotes, page 22)

“After half a century of co-operation – difficult, at times very difficult – a stage has been reached when both groups [i. e. Afrikaans and English-speaking whites] as never before are faced with a challenge to bury the past, to let it become the combined history of a unified volk/people. Today we are faced with threats for the future of our civilization, for our prosperity, for the contribution of the white man of Africa to the struggle of the white man of Europe and America to retain his hegemony in the world. Also to make Christianity victorious, sacrifices must be made, and nowhere is Christianity more threatened than in Africa. Sacrifices of sentiment is expected of everybody. There must not only be a union of provinces in South Africa. There must also be a union of hearts.”

Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966

Verwoerd in 1963, as quoted and translated by J. J. Venter in H.F. Verwoerd: Foundational aspects of his thought, Koers 64(4) 1999: 415–442

People , World , History , Time

“No Government can produce an economic miracle. An economic miracle depends on people on the shop floor, in the board room, in the sales office, working a bit harder and more efficiently than they have worked in the past.”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

On BBC TV (15 December 1976).
1970s

People , Dependency

“Great music is a psychical storm, agitating to fathomless depths the mystery of the past within us.”

Paul Elmer More (1864–1937) American journalist, critic, essayist and Christian apologist

Lafcadio Hearn http://books.google.com/books?id=_DcRAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Great+music+is+a+psychical+storm+agitating+to+fathomless+depths+the+mystery+of+the+past+within+us%22&pg=PA210#v=onepage, The Atlantic Monthly (February 1903)
Republished in Shelburne Essays http://books.google.com/books?id=2OMuAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Great+music+is+a+psychical+storm+agitating+to+fathomless+depths+the+mystery+of+the+past+within+us%22&pg=PA64#v=onepage, volume 2 (1905)

Music

“Exactly twenty-five years from 1 May 1950- the day President Truman authorized the first U. S. military assistance to Indochina- Saigon and the South Vietnamese government fell to the communist regime of North Vietnam, on 30 April 1975. Thus ended the longest conflict in American history. After every prolonged conflict in its experience, the United States has plunged into a period of assessment, trying to sift out the meaning of the memorable events of the recent past while searching for the key to a conflict-free future. This happened in the 1870s after our Civil War, in the 1920s after World War I, and for a relatively brief period in the late 1940s after World War II. But with the advent of the Cold War in 1947, followed by the Korean War in 1950- our first experience with limited war- we lived through over a quarter of a century during which the United States was continuously involved in some sort of emergency, contingency, or actual hostilities somewhere in the world. And so, after our agonizing experience in Vietnam, the first clear failure in our history, it is not surprising to find the United States of the 1970s and 1980s brooding over its frustrations and reevaluating its role in the world.”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Source: The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984), p. vii

Hostility , War , World , History

“Throughout the past several centuries, people have used the term race to describe groups of people in much the same way it was used in past centuries to describe groups of animals. People with ancestry from a particular region of tend to share certain inherited similar features, resembling their parents. However, the children of parents with substantially different ancestral backgrounds often have an appearance that is intermediate between that of their two parents, and in subsequent generations, the offspring may vary. In part because of the obvious similarities between animals and humans for how traits are inherited, and in part because of cultural, political, and religious traditions, notinos of racial purity and superiority have surged and ebbed yet persisted, crossing the boundaries of culture, geography, politics, and time. They are still with us today, and some of the most insidious actions based on notions of racial supremacy happened not long ago.”

Daniel J. Fairbanks (1956) American artist

Source: Everyone is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race (2015), pp. 16–17.

Children , People , Way , Parent

“I didn't go into this marriage with the idea of just trying it out. I fell in love and wanted to make a new life with him. A lot of people said to me, "How could you go out with someone with his past?" But I've always believed that everyone deserves a second chance. I fell in love with who he was when I met him: a strong man who could admit his weaknesses and work through them.”

Denise Richards (1971) American actress and model

Of her ex-husband, Charlie Sheen
Red Book interview

Love , Life , Marriage , People

“A girl of seven or ten years old is held to be the equal partner in a crime where another and a stronger is the principal; because she is in so many ways hampered and harmed by laws and customs pertaining to the past, we reach out hands of help especially to her that she may overtake the swift-marching procession of progress, for its sake that it may not slacken its speed on her account as much as for hers that she be not left behind.
I brought to the last Council our petition to Congress for the protection of women, which was responded to by raising the age of consent from ………. to sixteen years.”

Frances Willard (1839–1898) American suffragist

February 1891 https://prohibition.osu.edu/willard/speech

Women , Age , Law , Way

“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

Beauty , Future

“I am not far from believing that, in our own societies, history has replaced mythology and fulfils the same function, that for societies without writing and without archives the aim of mythology is to ensure that as closely as possible—complete closeness is obviously impossible—the future will remain faithful to the present and to the past.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) French anthropologist and ethnologist

Source: Myth and Meaning (1978), Chapter 4 : When Myth Becomes History

Faith , History , Future

“Studied in the dry light of conservative Christian anarchy, Russia became luminous like the salt of radium; but with a negative luminosity as though she were a substance whose energies had been sucked out — an inert residuum — with movement of pure inertia. From the car window one seemed to float past undulations of nomad life — herders deserted by their leaders and herds — wandering waves stopped in their wanderings — waiting for their winds or warriors to return and lead them westward; tribes that had camped, like Khirgis, for the season, and had lost the means of motion without acquiring the habit of permanence. They waited and suffered. As they stood they were out of place, and could never have been normal. Their country acted as a sink of energy like the Caspian Sea, and its surface kept the uniformity of ice and snow. One Russian peasant kissing an ikon on a saint's day, in the Kremlin, served for a hundred million. The student had no need to study Wallace, or re-read Tolstoy or Tourguenieff or Dostoiewski to refresh his memory of the most poignant analysis of human inertia ever put in words; Gorky was more than enough: Kropotkine answered every purpose.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Life , Cars , Kiss , Study

“Men looke not at the greatnesse of the evill past, but the greatnesse of the good to follow.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 15, p. 76 (Italics as per text)
Leviathan (1651)

Men , Evil

“A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future. By contrast, those who, for whatever reason, regard the resources at their disposal as an inheritance from the past that they feel obliged to pass on to their descendants, have a better chance of producing future generations prosperous enough to be able to continue to wrestle with the problems of increasing the quality of life.”

Garrett Hardin (1915–2003) American ecologist

Filters Against Folly (1985)

Life , Feeling , Problem , Chance

“Oh, such a gentle entreaty
this fool has found,
reminding me of my youth,
of pleasures past and present woes!”

Torquato Tasso Aminta

O che gentile
Scongiuro hà ritrovato questo sciocco
Di rammentarmi la mia giovanezza,
Il ben passato, e la presente noia.
Act II, scene ii.
Aminta (1573)

Pleasure , Youth , Fools

“"Personal density," Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, "is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth."
"Temporal bandwidth," is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "∆ t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Law , Sense , Future , Dependency

“If men in our evolutionary past did not invest in offspring, they would not have evolved strict mate preferences and thus women would be as drab as peahens. The fact that women are not as drab as peahens suggests a long history of male mate choice, which in turn suggests a long history of pair bonding and high male parental investment.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 149

Women , Men , History , Parent

“Nothing ever does happen in the future and nothing ever has happened in the past; the only happening is in the present moment. And yet people everywhere are so wrapped up in the past and future that the present moment tends to be overlooked. Yet this present moment is the only moment of reality; everything else is imagination. Now is the only time we can live. We can't live in the past, although some attempt it, and we can't live in the future. We live now or not at all.”

Martin Cecil, 7th Marquess of Exeter (1909–1988) Marquess of Exeter

On Eagle's Wings, 1977, p. 159
As of a Trumpet, On Eagle's Wings

People , Imagination , Reality , Time

“[modern art is the story of certain peoples'] desire to get rid of what is dead in human experience, to get rid of concepts, whether aesthetic or metaphysical or ethical or social, that, being garbed in the costumes of the past, get in the way of their enjoyment.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Lecture at Mount Holyoke College, August 1944; later published as 'A Tour of the Sublime', in 'Tiger's Eye', 15 Dec. 1948; as cited in 'Robert Motherwell, American Painter and Printmaker' https://www.theartstory.org/artist-motherwell-robert-life-and-legacy.htm#writings_and_ideas_header, on 'Artstory'
1940s

People , Art , Way , Dead

“If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.”

Hannah Arendt book The Life of the Mind

Source: The Life of the Mind (1971/1978), p. 55.

Science

“Vertically striped sheets of paper, the bands of which are 8.7 cms wide, alternate white and colored, are stuck over internal and external surfaces: walls, fences, display windows, etc.; and/or cloth/canvas support, vertical stripes, white and colored bands each 8.7 cms, the two ends covered with dull white paint.
I record that this is my work for the last four years, without any evolution or way out. This is the past: it does not imply either that it will be the same for another ten or fifteen years or that it will change tomorrow.
The perspective we are beginning to have, thanks to these past four years, allows a few considerations of the direct and indirect implications for the very conception of art. This apparent break (no research, or any formal evolution for four years) offers a platform that we shall situate at zero level, when the observations both internal (conceptual transformation as regards the action/praxis of a similar form) and external (work/production presented by others) are numerous and rendered all the easier as they are not invested in the various surrounding movements, but are rather derived from their absence.”

Daniel Buren (1938) sculptor from France

" Beware!" ("Mise en garde!") http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/buren1.pdf, in Konzeption/Conception, translated by Charles Harrison and Peter Townsend (Leverkusen: Stadtischer Museum, 1969.
1960s

Art , Color , Way , Support

“Memory, prophecy and fantasy
the past, the future and
the dreaming moment between
are all one country,
living one immortal day.

To know that is Wisdom.

To use it is the Art.”

Clive Barker book The Great and Secret Show

The Great and Secret Show

Wisdom , Dreams , Art , Memory

“Organisms […] are directed and limited by their past. They must remain imperfect in their form and function, and to that extent unpredictable since they are not optimal machines. We cannot know their future with certainty, if only because a myriad of quirky functional shifts lie within the capacity of any feature, however well adapted to a present role.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Quick Lives and Quirky Changes", p. 65
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Lie , Optimism , Future

“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

Hope , Memory , Future

“Pain is no longer pain when it is past.”

Margaret Junkin Preston (1820–1897) American writer

Old Songs and New. Nature's Lesson, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 575.

Pain

“I can tell you that I may be a lot of things but I am not dumb. And I wrote about going to Bosnia in my book in 2004, I laid it all out there. And you’re right, on a couple of occasions in the last weeks I just said some things that weren’t in keeping with what I knew to be the case and what I had written about in my book. And you know, I‘m embarrassed by it. I‘m very sorry I said it. I have said that, you know, it just didn‘t jive with what I had written about and knew to be the truth. So I know that it is something that some people have said, “Wait a minute. What happened here?””

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

But I have talked about this and written about it and then, unfortunately, in a few occasions I was not as accurate as I have been in the past.
April 16, 2008, Pennsylvania Democratic Presidential Debate, Philadelphia, when asked about her dishonesty concerning her recent comments about Bosnia. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iySWjciIrjB8hbu450lIABfnYcjwD903ANA80 http://youtube.com/watch?v=Cm_Cj6LNWmw http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/us/politics/16text-debate.html?pagewanted=9&_r=1
Presidential campaign (January 20, 2007 – 2008)

People , Truth , Books , Waiting

“The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms, and of course it’s one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that they can answer this need. And yet, and yet — one doesn’t expect an educated generation to be so soft on itself, much softer than the factory workers of the past who didn’t go back over and over to the same movies, mooning away in fixation on themselves and thinking this fixation meant movies had suddenly become an art, and their art.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Pleasure , Education , Art , Thinking

“There has for some time past been in evidence a sinister move in certain quarters to suppress, conceal or eliminate primary sources in Arabic, Persian and Urdu testifying to the temple demolition.”

Harsh Narain (1921–1995) Indian writer

The Ayodhya temple-mosque dispute: Focus on Muslim sources (1993)

Time

“c) all legal provisions of past and present Congressional Pork Barrel Laws, such as the previous PDAF and CDF Articles and the various Congressional Insertions which confer or conferred personal, lump-sum allocations to legislators from which they are able to fund specific projects which they themselves determine;”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

Law , Personality

“The great civilizations have to join together and result in new civilizations. The current civilizations will be cast away and they finally die like the disabled aged while they pave the way for the fresh newly born replacements. Similarly, the descendants of these new civilizations will do their best to fill the gap between the internal and external heritages and rescue the long forgotten spirituality; they will bring the past into the future.”

Elia M. Ramollah (1973) founder and leader of the El Yasin Community

360 Doctrines and Comprehensive Theories, Union of Civilizations

Age , Way , Future

“To quarrel over the past is to lose the future.”

Newton N. Minow (1926) United States attorney and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission

Speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, May 9, 1961 (the Wasteland Speech)

Future

“Now for the past five years or so, I don't know how long exactly, I have been more or less without permanent employment, wandering from pillar to post. You will say, ever since such and such a time you have been going downhill, you have been feeble, you have done nothing. Is that entirely true?”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

1880s, 1880, Letter to Theo (Cuesmes, July 1880)

Time

“The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Message to Chairman Khrushchev Concerning the Meaning of Events in Cuba (18 April 1961).
1961

History , Future

“He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 5 (pp. 130-131)

Men , Stupidity , Religion , Beauty

“The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

Twenty Years of Mr. Justice Holmes' Constitutional Opinions, 36 HARV. L. REV. 909, 931 (1923).
Other writings

Law , History , Change

“For a country without a past is nothing, a word
That, hardly spoken, loses its meaning,
A perishable wall destroyed by flame,
An echo of animal emotions.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"A Legend" (1949), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz and Robert Hass
Daylight (1953)

Animals , Country

“Holden decided that he was okay with not feeling any remorse for them. The moral complexity of the situation had grown past his ability to process it, so he just relaxed in the warm glow of victory instead.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 41 (p. 412)

Feeling , Victory

“If dialectical logic understands contradiction as “necessity” belonging to the very “nature of thought,” … it does so because contradiction belongs to the very nature of the object of thought, to reality, where Reason is still Unreason, and the irrational still the rational. Conversely, all established reality militates against the logic of contradictions — it favors the modes of thought which sustain the established forms of life and the modes of behavior which reproduce and improve them. The given reality has its own logic and its own truth; the effort to comprehend them as such and to transcend them presupposes a different logic, a contradicting truth. They belong to modes of thought which are non-operational in their very structure; they are alien to scientific as well as common-sense operationalism. … These modes of thought appear to be a relic of the past, like all non-scientific and non-empirical philosophy. They recede before a more effective theory and practice of Reason.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 142

Life , Truth , Behavior , Understanding

“I've been waiting at this frontier
And it seems like a hundred years,
But I couldn't see past the gate
I couldn't see past the hate.”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Earth Moving (1989)

Hate , Waiting

“Mortal! fear no more,—
The reign is past of ancient violence;
And Jove hath sworn that time shall not deface,
Nor death destroy, nor mutability
Perplex the truth of love.”

Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) British poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher

Sylphs
Poems (1851), Prometheus

Love , Death , Truth , Fear

“The perception that cannabis is a safe drug is a mistaken reaction to a past history of exaggeration of its health risks.”

Wayne Denis Hall (1951) Australian academic

Marijuana can cause mental disorders, loss of intelligence: 20-year study, New York Daily News, 7 October 2014, 7 October 2014, Engel, Meredith http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/marijuana-mental-disorders-loss-intelligence-20-year-study-article-1.1965934,

Health , History

“We live in troubled and dangerous times. But if we make the right choices, America's future will be even better than our past and better than our present. On the other hand, if we make improvident choices, the bright horizon I foresee will never materialize.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

2016, Remarks on Donald Trump and the 2016 race

Time , Future

“For the whole Past, as I keep repeating, is the possession of the Present; the Past had always something true, and is a precious possession. In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common Human Nature that has been developing itself. The actual True is the sum of all these; not any one of them by itself constitutes what of Human Nature is hitherto developed. Better to know them all than misknow them. "To which of these Three Religions do you specially adhere?" inquires Meister of his Teacher. "To all the Three!"”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

answers the other: "To all the Three; for they by their union first constitute the True Religion."
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

Religion , Nature , Teachers , Time

“My call is not to those who believe they belong to the past. My call is to those who believe in the future.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Speech at Civic Auditorium, Seattle, Washington (6 September 1960)
1960

Future

“One wonders how the literary revisionists and canon cleansers can bear to take the money. Imagine a school of sixteenth century art criticism that spent its time contently jeering at the past for not knowing about perspective.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

Money , School , Art , Imagination

“The right hon. Gentleman should be aware that, two weeks ago, I had an interesting meeting with an environmental campaigning group from the Soviet Union who openly admitted that the industrial policies followed in the past by the Soviet Union and many countries in central and eastern Europe had done a great deal of environmental damage. The difference is that those people felt that they had the power to change the policies to stop the destruction of their own environment. The policies of free-market economies which the right hon. Gentleman propounds have led to the pollution of the North sea and the Irish sea, the destruction of the rain forests in Brazil and Malaysia and long-term serious environmental damage by multinational companies all over the southern countries of this planet.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/dec/15/future-of-socialism in the House of Commons (15 December 1989).
1980s

People , Change , Sea , Country

“In day from some titanic past it seems
As if a thread divine of memory runs;
Born ere the Mighty One began his dreams,
Or yet were stars and suns.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

"Day"
By Still Waters (1906)

Dreams , Star , Memory , Sun

“The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of its Newspapers. These preach to the people daily, weekly; admonishing kings themselves; advising peace or war, with an authority which only the first Reformers, and a long-past class of Popes, were possessed of; inflicting moral censure; imparting moral encouragement, consolation, edification; in all ways diligently “administering the Discipline of the Church.””

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

War , People , Peace , Way

“People should also not want to determine themselves causally in such a way: I will now … become good once and for all, and do good by nature, because I could not then do anything else. For through this one denies the freedom which can in each moment negate all the past. … One makes himself into an object when one establishes causality in that way; for a morality to which I have been compelled is already not a morality.”

Otto Weininger (1880–1903) austrian philosopher and writer

Collected Aphorisms

People , Way , Nature , Freedom

“Whether we know it or not, we always approach the past with some preconceived ideas, with a rudimentary theory we wish to test. In this as in many other respects the cultural historian does not differ all that much from his predecessor, the traveller to foreign lands. Not the professional traveller who is only interested in one particular errand, be it the exploration of a country’s kinship system or its hydroelectric schemes, but the broad-minded traveller who wants to understand the culture of the country in which he finds himself.”

Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) art historian

In Search of Cultural History (1969)

Travel , Idea , Understanding , Country

“Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion real. Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in later life many efforts to recover it.

That the most powerful emotion of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personal defect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by the most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever knew, should have solved all the problems of the universe so thoroughly as to have quite ceased making itself anxious about past or future, and should have persuaded itself that all the problems which had convulsed human thought from earliest recorded time, were not worth discussing, seemed to him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for in a long life.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Life , Youth , Religion , Intelligence

“This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished,
for you, my love, my loss, my lesion,
a rosary of words to count out time's
illusions, all the minutes, hours, days
the calendar compounds as if the past
existed somewhere — like an inheritance
still waiting to be claimed.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"The Litany" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/litany.htm
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

Love , Loss , Time , Waiting

“Yet the only empirical data we have about how people conduct war and behave under its stresses is our experience with it in the past, however much we have to make adjustments for subsequent changes in conditions.”

Bernard Brodie (1910–1978) American nuclear strategist

1976

War , People , Change

“Where do you imagine Evita to stand: asking not to go back to the past, or next to the mothers and grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo?.”

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (1953) Argentine politician and ex President of Argentina

Nota en Clarin 27/07/2005 http://www.clarin.com/diario/2005/07/27/elpais/p-01201.htm
Unsourced, 2005

Imagination

“In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things—opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 71

Life , Reality , Freedom , Appearance

“I strive to make my art bear the same relation to painting that polyphony bears to music. Illustrative music is a thing of the past: it has become abstract and purely aesthetic, dependent for its effect upon rhythm and form.”

Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973) American artist

Quoted in Bryant American Pictures And Their Painters (1917), p. 302

Art , Music , Painting , Dependency

“I always adapt to everything that’s going on. If a new iPhone 8 is coming out, I gotta get it. If a new computer is coming out, I gotta get. Everything that’s new. I don’t live in the past. I just don’t. I still have my sound. I still have my flow. Everything sounds like the stuff that I created from back in the ‘90s. All the flows, I created all of that. I created everything. Everything you hear on the radio, it’s the Three 6 sound so I keep that sound but I still stay relevant. I don’t dwell in the past. My mind is not in the ‘90s, even though I’m a bigger star in the ‘90s -- I’m not in the ‘90s. Some people be stuck back in time, in their prime, in their moment, but I always move forward. A lot of people ask me that. I just move forward.”

Juicy J (1975) American rapper and record producer from Tennessee; co-founder of Three 6 Mafia

Juicy J Interview Rubba band Business Wiz Khalifa Juicy J https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/8070920/juicy-j-interview-rubba-band-business-wiz-khalifa

People , Star , Time

“Technologists are not noted for learning from the errors of the past. They look forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again. […] As each new technology matures, customers are no longer happy with the flashy promises of the technology but instead demand understandable and workable designs. Slowly the manufacturers relearn the same basic principles and apply them to their products. The most egregious failures always come from the developers of the most recent technologies.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Introduction to the 2002 Edition, p. xv.
The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002)

Error , Failure , Understanding , Problem

“In the past eight years, failed policies have caused our country to deteriorate. Our rights have been trampled, and our security threatened. We are weaker by almost every measure. We are on the wrong path. That is clear even to someone who was not even born here. I came to the United States from Rome, Italy in 1985. I followed all the rules, and finally became a naturalized citizen in 1996. Others who want to come to the U. S. to live and work should follow the same rules. We are a nation of laws for a reason. There should be no shortcuts for those who don’t want to pay or wait”

Antonio Sabàto Jr. (1972) American actor and model

Speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention (July 18, 2016)

Law , Nature , Waiting , Country

“The heart opens itself to the hope that the misfortunes of the past will be replaced by fruitful dialogue.”

Elio Toaff (1915–2015) Italian rabbi

"Pope Speaks in Rome Synagogue, in the First Such Visit on Record" http://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/14/international/europe/14POPE.html by E. J. Dionne Jr, The New York Times, 13 April 1986, retrieved 9 August 2010.

Hope , Heart

“I never forgot that schooling had irretrievably changed my family’s life. That knowledge, however, did not weaken ambition. Instead, it strengthened resolve. Those times I remembered the loss of my past with regret, I quickly reminded myself of all the things my teachers could give me. (They could make me an educated man.) I tightened my grip on pencil and books. I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard to forget. But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers. I remembered too well that education had changed my family’s life. I would not have become a scholarship boy had I not so often remembered.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life , Books , Education , School

“History’ and ‘Political Economy’ have not been differentiated on the basis of systematic reflection; rather, they have been quite different in origin and conceptual structure. Only on further development of both disciplines are they set closer together and merged into a single science, namely ‘Sociology’, which for about a hundred years past has been assimilating other fields of science.”

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) austrian economist, philosopher and sociologist

Source: 1930s, "Empirical Sociology" (1931), p. 319; Lead paragraph

History , Science

“One way to clarify the origin and character, if not the justification, of the ideal inspiring our programmatic institutional ideas is to say that our program arises from the generalization of aims broadly shared by the great secular doctrines of emancipation of the recent past—both liberal and socialist—and by the social theories that supported them. At the heart of each of these doctrines lay the belief that the weakening of social divisions and hierarchies would reveal deeper commonalities and liberate productive and creative powers. The theoretical and practical consequences of this belief were drastically constricted by dogmatic assumptions about the possible forms of social change and their possible institutional expressions. We have attacked the second set of constraints and therefore, by implication, the first. The result is a more generalized or radicalized version of the social ideal. Our attack on these constraints has led us to rethink the content of the progressive cause.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: The Critical Legal Studies Movementː Another Time, A Greater Task (2015), p. 104-5

Way , Idea , Support , Change

“…WHEREAS, IN THE PAST, THE POINT OF DISAGREEMENT HAS BEEN BETWEEN DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE, IT WILL BE, IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, BETWEEN NOISE AND SO-CALLED MUSICAL SOUNDS.
THE PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING MUSIC, PRINCIPALLY THOSE WHICH EMPLOY HARMONY AND ITS REFERENCE TO PARTICULAR STEPS IN THE FIELD OF SOUND, WILL BE INADEQUATE FOR THE COMPOSER, WHO WILL BE FACED WITH THE ENTIRE FIELD OF SOUND.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Quote of John Cage, in: 'The Future of Music: Credo' (1937); SILENCE; lectures and writings by Cage, John', Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, CREDO/3
1930s

Music , Future

“It seems to us that the past is our property. Well, on the contrary — we are its property, because we are not able to make changes in it, while it fills the whole of our existence.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Klucz niebieski albo opowieści biblijne zebrane ku pouczeniu i przestrodze
Original: "Otóż przeciwnie – to my jesteśmy jej własnością, ponieważ nie jesteśmy w stanie dokonać w niej zmian, ona natomiast wypełnia całość naszego istnienia."

Change

“Catilina in particular was one of the most nefarious men in that nefarious age. His villanies belong to the criminal records, not to history; but his very outward appearance - the pale countenance, the wild glance, the gait by turns sluggish and hurried - betrayed his dismal past. He possessed in a high degree the qualities which are required in the leader of such a band - the faculty of enjoying all pleasures and of bearing all privations, courage, military talent, knowledge of men, the energy of a felon, and that horrible mastery of vice which knows how to bring the weak to fall, and how to train the fallen to crime.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Pt. 1, Translated by W.P. Dickson
On the Praetor Lucius Catilina
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 1

Men , Pleasure , Age , History

“Pride in one’s work carries with it a determination to accept the demands imposed by that work: in the case of philosophy to follow the argument where it leads, in the case of history to discover what actually happened, in the case of literature to explore to its depths a particular theme. In consequence, this sort of pride demands freedom: it has to be laid low in any authoritarian State. The historian, in such a system, has to conform to official interpretations of the past, the philosopher to dogmas, the writer to stereotypes of human action, the craftsman to “production-schedules.” More subtly, attempts are made to lay pride low in a consumer’s society: the film-director, the novelist, the craftsman are called upon to produce “what will sell” at whatever cost to their pride in workmanship.”

John Passmore (1914–2004) Australian philosopher

Source: The Perfectibility of Man (1971), p. 290.

History , Literature , Freedom

“I hope there will be stability and security in all parts of Iraq and neighboring Arab countries. I hope there will be national unity in Iraq by forgetting the past and looking for the future.”

Abdul Rahman Arif (1916–2007) President and Prime Minister of Iraq

As quoted in anon (August 25, 2007), Abdel-Rahman Aref, 91, Former Iraqi President, Is Dead http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/25/world/middleeast/25aref.html?ref=world, The New York Times.

Hope , Future , Parting , Country

“We have classical associations and great names of our own which we can confidently oppose to the most splendid of ancient times. Senate has not to our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. We respect the Great Charter more than the laws of Solon. The Capitol and the Forum impress us with less awe than our own Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey…The list of warriors and statesmen by whom our constitution was founded or preserved, from De Montfort down to Fox, may well stand a comparison with the Fasti of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sydney is as noble as the libation which Thrasea poured to Liberating Jove: and we think with far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails than of Russell saying, as he turned away from his wife, that the bitterness of death was past.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

' History https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55901/55901-h/55901-h.htm', Edinburgh Review (May 1828)

Death , Pleasure , Law , Confidence

“Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.”

Truman Capote book Local Color

Local Color (1950)

Wisdom , Age , Childhood

“Advances in technology won’t be as significant as they have been in the past, most games won’t be materially improved by simulating every drop of water in the pond you are wading through. More resources can be profitably spent to make the creation process easier. How things will play out with respect to connectivity and where the data resides and processing takes place is still a very interesting question. The overlap and convergence between desktop computers, consoles, laptops, handheld gaming devices, and cell phones is also interesting. It is all still quite exciting.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

Quoted in Brad Cook, "John Carmack: Making the Magic Happen" http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2009/02/johncarmack/ Apple.com

Game , Question , Water

“We developed a shorthand language of our own which we fell into for the rest of our lives whenever we met, no holds barred — all a matter of past reference, a common language, but basically affection, along with humor, and appreciation of each other’s minds, and of Krazy Kat. Faced with England, and the New World, and Freud and all, we always managed to relax, and go back to the kidding, and bad punning, and drinking, to the end. It really was marvelous.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

On his friendship with T. S. Eliot
The Paris Review interview (1963)

World , Drink

“Inherent in human beings are possibilities which we now can't even entertain. Before the space launch, space travel to many of us was the stuff of fantasy, of science fiction. We know what it is to explore the limits of what we consider to be a human being, but if we were to transform our understanding of ourselves, if we were to transform what we knew a human being to be, new possibilities of expression would open. We could function in a more creative way. In a more humane way. In the past we were transformed by the thrust of evolution or by accidental forces. This time we should transform ourselves with a conscious, committed degree of self-awareness.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

Interview with USA Today, "Mankind Must Find a New Self Awareness", Dan Neuharth and Miles White, December 14, 1982

Way , Travel , Understanding , Science

“Lots of us SF-types like the idea of traveling to the Future (although, having now done so once myself -- the hard way -- I’m less sure), but why do we imagine the Future would want us? Oh, a few 21st-century Icemen, perhaps, as historical curiosities, but in our hundreds of millions? It would be like the greatest wave of immigration ever, but from the past into other people’s Now. It might seem to them like sacrificing resources needed for their children to their great-great-great-grandparents. Counter-evolutionary, among other things.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Geek Speak Magazine Interview (2010)

Children , People , Way , Travel

“She has a fascination with Mayan prophecies, and she's writing a book that's sort of her remembrance of her past incarnation. Whatever she applies herself to, she makes it this beautiful, glorious world around her. All of us kids have always been artistic because of her influence.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

on his mom, Dolly Wiseman. Spin (October 2001)

Books , World , Beauty

““You ask a question that cannot be answered without knowing the nature of the primal chaos from which being arose. Is Spiral Castle like a crystal, once shattered, forever destroyed? That is what I prefer to believe. Or is it like a still pond, whose mirrored surface may be shattered and churned, but which will inevitably restore itself as the waves die down? You may believe this if you choose. You can even believe—why not?—that the restored universe will be an improvement on the old. For me, so long as I have my vengeance I care not what comes after.”
“And us?”
“We die.” An involuntary rise in the dragon’s voice, a slight quickening of cadence, told her that she had touched upon some unclean hunger akin to but less seemly than battle-lust. “We die beyond any chance of rebirth. You and I and all we have known will cease to be. The worlds that gave us birth, the creatures that shaped us—all will be unmade. So comprehensive will be their destruction that even their pasts will die with them. It is an extinction beyond death that we court. Though the ages stretch empty and desolate into infinity and beyond, there will be none to remember us, nor any to mourn. Our joys, sorrows, struggles, will never have been.
“And even if there is a universe to come, it will know naught of us.””

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 19 (pp. 340-341)

Death , Hunger , Age , World

“The industry has not grown much during the past three or four years. It is practically stabilized at the present [1927]. What has taken place is a shift from one manufacturer to another.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 210. Sloan in his Proving Ground address in 1927 to automobile editors, in discussing the so-called saturation point.

“Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The rapids are near, and the daylight's past.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

A Canadian Boat-Song.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“It is necessary to separate aesthetics from art because aesthetics deals with opinions on perception of the world in general. In the past one of the two prongs of art’s function was its value as decoration. So any branch of philosophy that dealt with “beauty” and thus, taste, was inevitably duty bound to discuss art as well. Out of this “habit” grew the notion that there was a conceptual connection between art and aesthetics, which is not true. This idea never drastically conflicted with artistic considerations before recent times, not only because the morphological characteristics of art perpetuated the continuity of this error, but as well, because the apparent other “functions” of art (depiction of religious themes, portraiture of aristocrats, detailing of architecture, etc.) used art to cover up art.”

Joseph Kosuth (1945) American conceptual artist

Art after Philosophy, 1969

World , Beauty , Art , Error

“We feel that we are surrounded by the congregated bones of the great men of past times, who have filled history with their deeds, and the earth with their renown. And yet it almost provokes a smile at the vanity of human ambition to see how they are crowded together and jostled in the dust; what parsimony is observed in doling out a scanty nook, a gloomy corner, a little portion of earth, to those whom, when alive, kingdoms could not satisfy, and how many shapes and forms and artifices are devised to catch the casual notice of the passenger, and save from forgetfulness for a few short years a name which once aspired to occupy ages of the world's thought and admiration.”

Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

"Westminster Abbey".
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)

Men , Age , World , Smile

“Art today can only be revolutionary, that is, it must aspire at the complete and radical reconstruction of society, even if for no other reason than to emancipate intellectual creation from the chains which obstruct it and to allow all mankind to rise to the heights that only geniuses could reach in the past.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Quote of Breton, from La Clé des Champs (1953); as cited by Thomas Molnar, The Decline of the Intellectual (1961)
after 1930

Art

“He's not really a difficult interview. You just have to catch the essence and rhythm of what he's saying. I'd ask him how baseball has changed over the past 25 years and he'd start telling me about his life as a dental student in Kansas City.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

On Casey Stengel, as quoted in "Loquacious Sportswriter: Arnold Hano Calls 'em as He Sees 'em in World of Sports" by Earl Gustkey, in The Los Angeles Times (April 23, 1970), p. D1
Sports-related

Life , Change

“All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins Pied Beauty

"Pied Beauty", lines 7-11
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Beauty , Change

“The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.”

H. G. Wells book The Discovery of the Future

The Discovery of the Future (1901)

“Chile offered refuge and asylum to Erich Honecker, the tyrant of East Germany who wanted the tanks in the streets. Everyone said, "It is time to bury the past without bitterness." But then Chile clamored for justice for General Augusto Pinochet. On the same day, Spain indicted Chile's Pinochet for crimes against humanity, and welcomed with honors, Fidel Castro, while Castro's critics or any group that annoyed the tyrant, lay dead or rotted in prison, or tried to recover from the deadly work camps to which he sent them.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

Justice , Time , Dead

“I want to have her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed (1961)

Death

“And a proverb haunts my mind
As a spell is cast,
"The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past."”

Sarah Doudney (1841–1926) English novelist and poet

Poem: Lesson of the Water-Mill.

Water

“The opinion appears to be gaining ground that this very general conception of functionality, born on mathematical ground, is destined to supersede the narrower notion of causation, traditional in connection with the natural sciences. As an abstract formulation of the idea of determination in its most general sense, the notion of functionality includes and transcends the more special notion of causation as a one-sided determination of future phenomena by means of present conditions; it can be used to express the fact of the subsumption under a general law of past, present, and future alike, in a sequence of phenomena. From this point of view the remark of Huxley that Mathematics "knows nothing of causation" could only be taken to express the whole truth, if by the term "causation" is understood "efficient causation." The latter notion has, however, in recent times been to an increasing extent regarded as just as irrelevant in the natural sciences as it is in Mathematics; the idea of thorough-going determinancy, in accordance with formal law, being thought to be alone significant in either domain.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), p. 290 ; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 29): The Nature of Mathematics.

Truth , Law , Mathematics , Idea

“Religion has no limits, and no bounds;—
The vast, the infinite, and the eternal.,
Never from her may Genius separate.
Imagination from its earliest flight,
Past o'er the bounds of life : and the sublime
Is the reflection of divinity.”

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

Translations, From the French

Life , Religion , Imagination

“Our assent to the hypothesis implies that it is held to be true of all particular instances. That these cases belong to past or to future times, that they have or have not already occurred, makes no difference in the applicability of the rule to them. Because the rule prevails, it includes all cases.”

William Whewell (1794–1866) English philosopher & historian of science

Part 2, Book 11, ch. 5, sect. 3, art. 10.
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840)

Time , Future

“For me the art world is like a huge river, which began somewhere in the past and keeps flowing towards the future.”

Ilya Kabakov (1933) Soviet and American conceptual artist

Source: Boris Groĭs, ‎David A. Ross, ‎Iwona Blazwick (1998). Ilya Kabakov, p. 22

World , Art , Future

“in the unliterary grammar of life, where the future tense stands first, and the past is formed, not from the indefinite, but from the present indicative, "to have been" is "to be."”

Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927) English humorist

On The Art of Making Up One's Mind
The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1915/1915-h/1915-h.htm (1898)

Life , Future

“You see, I have no real complaints of how you've left your past behind
I guess what gets me worried is you've erased him from your mind.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

I Wonder What Happened to Him
Song lyrics, Dance Band on the Titanic (1977)

“The Great Books show … that even those thinkers of the past who are now often looked upon as the most reactionary, the medieval theologians, insisted, as Aristotle had before them, that the truth of any statement is its conformity to reality or fact, and that sense experience is required to discover the particular matters of fact that test the truth of general statements about the nature of things.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Truth , Books , Nature , Reality

“Oh! world of sweet phantoms, how precious thou art!
The past is perpetual youth to the heart.”

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

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Youth , World , Art , Heart

“To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, an alert citizenry today should take the trouble to learn how easy it can be for a powerful minority to manipulate information to win the support-or the indifference-of the majority towards an action.”

Randal Marlin (1938) Canadian academic

Source: Propaganda & The Ethics Of Persuasion (2002), Chapter One, Why Study Propaganda?, p. 14

Support , Learning , Indifference

“By stating that the analysis of the laws of motion governing the capitalist mode of production necessarily includes at least some essential elements of an analysis of economic phenomena valid for the whole historical epoch encompassing economic organizations in which commodity production exists, one extends the validity of parts of Marx’s Capital not only into the past but also into the future.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

Introduction to Capital. Introduction to volume 1 (1976)

Law , Future , Parting

“Halliburton is not a "company" doing business in Iraq. It is a WAR PROFITEER, bilking millions from the pockets of average Americans. In past wars they would have been arrested — or worse.
The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush?”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

2004

War , Business

“The Uniﬁed Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is used to specify, visualize, construct, and document the artifacts of a software system. It captures decisions and understanding about systems that must be constructed. It is used to understand, design, browse, conﬁgure, maintain, and control information about such systems. It is intended for use with all development methods, lifecycle stages, application domains, and media. The modeling language is intended to unify past experience about modeling techniques and to incorporate current software best practices into a standard approach. UML includes semantic concepts, notation, and guidelines. It has static, dynamic, environmental, and organizational parts. It is intended to be supported by interactive visual modeling tools that have code generators and report writers. The UML speciﬁcation does not deﬁne a standard process but is intended to be useful with an iterative development process. It is intended to support most existing object-oriented development processes.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

James Rumbaugh, Ivar Jacobson, & Booch (1999) The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. p. 1

Understanding , Support , Decision , Parting

“Over the past few weeks, as the world commemorates Nelson Mandela, an uncomfortable spotlight has been shone on Conservatives who branded the ANC as terrorists in the 1980s,” he says in an article on the UK ConservativeHome website. How will today’s crop of Conservative climate refuseniks explain themselves to future generations, in a world made hotter, nasty and poor by global warming? There is nothing Conservative about advocating for the destruction of the climate, and thus all we hold dear. This is not a credible Conservative standpoint: it is reckless and extreme.”

Mohamed Nasheed (1967) Maldivian politician, 4th president of the Maldives

Quoted on BBC News, "Mohamed Nasheed: climate denying Conservatives “risk irrelevancy”" http://www.rtcc.org/2014/01/14/mohamed-nasheed-climate-denying-conservatives-risk-irrelevancy/, January 14, 2014.

World , Future

“Mr. Parnell said the other night, that Ireland is a "nation". Well, if a nation only means a certain number of individuals collected between certain latitudes and longitudes, I admit in that sense Ireland is a nation. But if there is anything further necessary— if to make a nation you require a past united history, traditions in which you can all join, achievements of which you all are proud, interests which you share in common, and sympathies which belong to all— then emphatically Ireland is not a nation; Ireland is two nations.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Source: Speech to the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations in St. James's Hall, London (15 May 1886), quoted in The Times (17 May 1886), p. 6

History , Sense , Night

“He swore, pissed off, trying to keep the past in the past instead of stinking up the present.”

K. A. Bedford book Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait

Source: Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait (2008), Chapter 11 (p. 130)

Quotes about the past page 22

Quotes about the past
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