Quotes about the past (4316 quotes, page 26)

“First let me persuade you of my metaphysics and epistemology, then my theory of science, then my ethics and social theory, and then having done all that, I will convince you of my political theory. Over the past two decades, I have become convinced that this is a mug’s game… The reason Plato, Hobbes, Marx, Mill, and Rawls (many others could be named) garner widespread attention as political theorists has much more to do with their destinations than with their starting points.”

Ian Shapiro (1956) American political theorist

Shapiro, Ian. 2011. The Real World of Democratic Theory. Princeton University Press. p. 254; As cited in: Michael A. Fotos. Vincent Ostrom’s Revolutionary Science of Association http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/colloquia/materials/papers/Fotos_VO's%20RevolutionaryScienceOfAssociation_15Mar2013.pdf, Lecturer in Political Science, Ethics, Politics, and Economics Yale University, New Haven CT : About Vincent Ostrom.

Game , Science

“When you are in the future, the past looks different.”

Richard Mottram (1946) British civil ervant

April 2004, to the Commons committee on public administration, Hoggart, Simon. 'Sir Humphrey reveals his Dusty Springfield side' http://politics.guardian.co.uk/redbox/comment/0,9408,1206669,00.html, The Guardian (30 April 2004).

Future

“I didn't imagine that 30 years later, there'd be this enthusiasm and excitement about it. This celebration, I didn't see that coming at all. Back to the Future came out, and there was a two-year lapse, and we did II and III together. We were just making another movie and hoping it gets past opening night. But the kids who saw this film, they've grown up and had kids, who have grown up and had kids. It's exponential, it just keeps spreading out more and more. But the film has aged well. I saw it last night. It seems very contemporary.”

Christopher Lloyd (1938) American actor

Christopher Lloyd on Back to the Future Day, Eric Stoltz, and the Passage of Time http://www.vulture.com/2015/10/christopher-lloyd-on-back-to-the-future-day.html (October 21, 2015)

Age , Hope , Imagination , Future

“What is going on here is a deliberate revision by Current not only of Lincoln but of himself in order to serve the saint in the 1980s as opposed to the saint at earlier times when black were still colored, having only just stopped being Negroes. In colored and Negro days the saint might have wanted them out of the country, as he did. But in the age of Martin Luther King even the most covertly racist of school boards must agree that a saint like Abraham Lincoln could never have wanted a single black person to leave freedom’s land much less bravery’s home. So all the hagiographers are redoing their plaster images and anyone who draws attention to the discrepancy between their own past crudities and their current falsities is a very bad person indeed, and not a scholar, and probably a communist as well.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"Lincoln and the Priests of Academe"
1990s, United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)

Age , School , Color , Home

“A nation that fails to take pride in its past achievements or to take inspiration therefrom, can never build up the present or plan for the future. A weak nation can never attain greatness.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee Quoted from Talreja, K. M. (2000). Holy Vedas and holy Bible: A comparative study. New Delhi: Rashtriya Chetana Sangathan.

Future

“Financial hardship has a way of keeping people sober. The challenge I see at such times is simple: Will we face reality or deny it? In the past I have done both. But when it comes down to really doing something about a problem, I'm learning that it's prudent to address it head on with those who are closest to you and work at it together.”

Danny Yamashiro (1967) American radio evangelist

From Paradise Calls, pages 80

People , Way , Problem , Reality

“I realized that for this moment, nothing in the past mattered. Nothing terrible in the future mattered. What mattered was her skin against me, her hand holding me, the perfume of her hair and skin and the warmth of her breath against my chest. This was satori. This was truth.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 25 (p. 532)

Truth , Future

“Loss of market begets unemployment. Emphasis has been on short-term profit, to the undernourishment of plans that might generate new product and service that would keep the company alive and provide jobs and more jobs. It is no longer socially acceptable performance to lose market and to dump hourly workers on to the heap of unemployed.
The basic sickness of American industry and resulting unemployment is failure of top management to manage. Loss of market, and unemployment, are not foreordained. They are not inevitable. They are not acceptable. The day is past when people in management need not know anything about management by which I mean to include problems of production, supervision, training.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

Source: Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position, (1982), p. i; Preface

People , Failure , Problem , Loss

“Everyone, including I, is certain
that "that thing" they're searching for
is in the future.
But how many people have realized
that "that" is actually in the past?
I can't even guess.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Duty
Lyrics, Duty

People , Search , Future

“If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Source: Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Chapter 1: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Life , Future

“He had made one of the greatest catches in Polo Grounds history; he had played third base as no Giant before or since ever played it; he was a slashing hitter and a scientific hitter; he played baseball with courage and spirit. Yet, somehow, failure hovered about him; a pebble in a base line is remembered more than his 24-game hitting streak; his feud with McGraw is recalled more vividly than his 4 hits in a single game against Walter Johnson or the three times he made three hits in a single game all the same season. His spat with Hornsby and his disagreement with Terry come more quickly to mind than those five years he tore pitchers apart; more quickly to mind than the years he hit.358 and.379.

It ought not to be that way. Two pebbles in a base line can cause a team to lose a World Series, but they can't wipe out the dazzling years, the.311 lifetime average. Two pebbles ought not persuade baseball men to say Devlin or Groh or Herzog, but somehow they do. So we put Lindstrom here, on this greatest Giant team, and we put the pebbles back where they belong—as part of a rocky past that littered his way, but in no way diminished the greatness of Fred Lindstrom.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

On Fred Lindstrom, from "Lindy," in Greatest Giants of Them All (1967), pp. 196-197
Sports-related

Men , World , Way , History

“I say that such qualities were never more needed in the word. Let us hold on to what we are; let us not try to be like anybody else…With our pertinacity, our love of freedom, our love of ordered freedom, our respect for law, our respect for the individual and our power of combining in service; indeed, in our strength and in our weakness, I believe, from my heart, that our people are fitted to pass through whatever trials may be before us, and to emerge—if they are true to their own best traditions—a greater people in the future than they have been in the past.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast from London (25 September 1933), quoted in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 14.
1933

Love , People , Law , Freedom

“The age-long history of thinking on gravitation, too, was erased from the collective consciousness, and that force somehow became the serendipitous child of Newton's genius. The new attitude is well illustrated by the anecdote of the apple, a legend spread by Voltaire, one of the most active and vehement erasers of the past. … The need to build the myth of an ex nihilo creation of modern science gave rise to much impassioned rhetoric.”

Lucio Russo (1944) Italian historian and scientist

11.10, "The Erasure of Ancient Science", pp. 390–391
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

Age , History , Thinking , Science

“How would your life be different if … You didn't allow yourself to be defined by your past? Let today be the day … You stop letting your history interfere with your destiny and awaken to the opportunity to release your greatest self.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 125

Life , History

“The tension felt in the modern world between those who look at the confluence of neuroscientific data, historical data, and other information illuminating our past and those who simply accept received wisdom as their guide in life is real and profound. Yet it may not be as divisive as one would think. It appears that all of us share the same moral networks and systems, and we all respond in similar ways to similar issues. The only thing different, then, is not our behavior but our theories about why we respond the way we do. It seems to me that understanding that our theories are the source of all our conflicts would go a long way in helping people with different belief systems to get along.”

Michael S. Gazzaniga (1939) American neuroscientist

The Ethical Brain (2005)

Life , Wisdom , People , World

“How slow the Shadow creeps: but when 'tis past,
How fast the Shadows fall. How fast! How fast!”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"On the Same" (On a Sundial II)
Sonnets and Verse (1938)

“History is truly the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity; whose voice, but the orator's, can entrust her to immortality?”
Historia vero testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis, qua voce alia nisi oratoris immortalitati commendatur?

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

De Oratore Book II; Chapter IX, section 36

Life , Truth , History , Light

“Without dynamic conquering spirit, even devotion to a divine cause will be of little avail In this hard world which is an arena for trial of strength with brute forces, mere goodness or noble virtues will not hold the field for a single moment. That is why we find that in spite of all the piety, goodness and devotion to God all through the past thousand years, we were trampled under the feet by foreign aggressors who, though total strangers to goodness and virtue, had a passion for heroic action and organised effort.”

M. S. Golwalkar book Bunch of Thoughts

M.S. Golwalkar : ‘Bunch of Thoughts’, third edition, 1996, p. 92 Quoted from Talreja, K. M. (2000). Holy Vedas and holy Bible: A comparative study. New Delhi: Rashtriya Chetana Sangathan.
Bunch of Thoughts

God , World , Effort , Passion

“Though aware of just how hard it will be to attain the distant goal I have glimpsed, I am sustained by the certainty that the path I am following is the right one. I repudiate nothing in my past... Consciousness has always guided me in my work and I am comforted by the knowledge that in all my endeavors, even in the moments of greatest uncertainty, my personality has always managed to come through.”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

Quote from an article in the Bolognese fascist magazine 'L'Assalto', 18 Febr. 1928; as cited in 'Morandi 1894 – 1964', published by Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, ed: M. C. Bandera & R. Miracco - 2008; p. 268
1925 - 1945

Knowledge , Distant , Personality

“It is past all controversy that what costs dearest is, and ought to be, most valued.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Chap 11.
Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book IV

“Mankind has advanced. Human progress is ceaseless. We can look at Bosnia or Zaire or Rwanda and conclude that building just societies is a fool's errand. We are always, despite our advances, only one sin away from slipping into the abyss of terror and ignorance.
But that is not so. Generations upon generations have driven the human race farther and farther from darkness. Past episodes of abominable human cruelty are kept vivid in the memories of succeeding generations. "Never again," is the admonition passed from the survivors of the Holocaust to their descendants and to us all. And although such an important reminder will not always prevent the occurrence of cruelty and violence even at levels approaching genocide, the civilized world is more inclined to organize opposition to such tragedies if not as early as we should, at least sooner than we once would have.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

1990s, Speech at Ohio Wesleyan University (1997)

World , Fools , Memory

“The characteristic activity of science is not construction, but induction. The more often something has occurred in the past, the more certain that it will in all the future. Knowledge relates solely to what is and to its recurrence. New forms of being, especially those arising from the historical activity of man, lie beyond empiricist theory. Thoughts which are not simply carried over from the prevailing pattern of consciousness, but arise from the aims and resolves of the individual, in short, all historical tendencies that reach beyond what is present and recurrent, do not belong to the domain of science.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 144.

Lie , Knowledge , Science , Future

“The spirit of Japan, conceived in the Nara epoch, carried in the womb of her islands throughout the Heian period, delivered in the anguish of the Middle Ages, schooled by the rod of iron of the Tokugawas, fully grown now, benefited from all her past experiences. She cannot forget them.”

Louis Frédéric (1923–1996) French scholar

Frédéric, L. (1984). Daily life in Japan at the time of the samurai, 1185-1603. Tokyo: Tuttle.

Age , School , Forgetting

““Let me get this,” the Old Man said. “You are promising the human race that, if we will just surrender, you will take care of us and make us happy. Right?”
“Exactly!”
The Old Man studied this while looking past my shoulders. He spat on the floor. “You know,” he said slowly, “me and my kind, we have often been offered that bargain. It never worked out worth a damn.””

Robert A. Heinlein book The Puppet Masters

Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 10 (p. 58)

Study , Happiness

“There is a philosophical, or metaphysical position that can be taken–maybe its a scientific hypothesis–that the past cannot in fact exist. Everything that can possibly exist exists now. Things now may be expressive of some conceivable or describable past state of affairs, yes:but that's different from saying this this former state actually somehow exists in the form of "the past". Even in our memory[…]there is no past:no scenes preserved with all their sights and sounds. Merely fleeting states of mind, myriad points assembled for a moment to make a new picture (but "picture" is wrong too, too full, too fixed) of what we think are former states of things: things that once were, or may have been the case.”

John Crowley book Four Freedoms

Prelude
Four Freedoms (2009)

Thinking , Memory

“We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.”

Henry James book The Aspern Papers

The Aspern Papers; The Turn of the Screw; The Liar; The Two Faces.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

Feeling

“Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
Into the silent hollow of the past;
What is there that abides
To make the next age better for the last?”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

St. 3.
Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/1169/ (July 21, 1865)

Life , Age

“In AH 871 (AD 1466-67) he started for the conquest of Karnãl [Girnãr] which is now known as JûnãgaDh. It is said that this country had been in the possession of the predecessors of Rãi Mandalîk for the past two thousand years… Sultãn Mahmûd relied on the help of Allãh and proceeded there; on the way he laid waste the land of SoraTh… From that place the Sultãn went towards the temple of those people. Many Rajpûts who were known as Parwhãn, decided to lay down their lives, and started fighting with swords and spears in (defence) of the temple… Sultãn Mahmûd postponed the conquest of the fort to the next year… and returned to Ahmadãbãd.”

Mahmud Begada (1458–1511) Sultan of Gujarat

Junagadh (Gujarat). Burhãn-i-Ma‘sir, in Uttara Taimûra Kãlîna Bhãrata, Persian texts translated into Hindi by S.A.A. Rizvi, 2 Volumes, Aligarh, 1958-59. Vol. II, p. 214

People , Way , Help , Fight

“The past is… much more uncertain—or even falsely reported—than is usually recognized.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Preface
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Falseness

“We had our domestic problems which resulted from the war. The chief of these was the care and relief of the afflicted veterans and their dependents. This was a tremendous task, on which about $3,000,000,000 has already been expended. No doubt there have been cases where the unworthy have secured aid, while the worthy have gone unrelieved. Some mistakes were inevitable, but our people and our Government have at all times been especially solicitous to discharge most faithfully this prime obligation. What is now being done is related to you in detail by General Hines, of the Veterans' Bureau, a public official of demonstrated merit, so that I shall not dwell upon it. During the past year, under the distinguished and efficient leadership of Commander Drain, the Legion itself has undertaken to provide an endowment fund of $5,000,000 to minister to the charitable requirements of their comrades. The response to this appeal has been most generous and the results appear most promising. The Government can do much, but it can never supply the personal relationship that comes from the ministrations of a private charity of that kind.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

War , People , Problem , Affliction

“The international disputes which united and divided Luxemburg, Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, Bordiga or Trotsky on these issues represent the last great strategic debate in the European workers’ movement. Since then, there has been little significant theoretical development of the political problems of revolutionary strategy in metropolitan capitalism that has had any direct contact with the masses. The structural divorce between original Marxist theory and the main organizations of the working class in Europe has yet to be historically resolved. The May-June revolt in France, the upheaval in Portugal, the approaching dénouement in Spain, presage the end of this long divorce, but have not accomplished it. The classical debates, therefore, still remain in many respects the most advanced limit of reference we possess today. It is thus not mere archaism to recall the strategic confrontations which occurred four or five decades ago. To reappropriate them, on the contrary, is a step towards a Marxist discussion that has the—necessarily modest—hope of assuming an ‘initial shape’ of correct theory today. Régis Debray has spoken, in a famous paragraph, of the constant difficulty of being contemporary with our present. In Europe at least, we have yet to be sufficiently contemporary with our past.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

"The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci", New Left Review (1976)

Hope , Problem

“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book V, Ch. 3
My Antonia (1918)

“Primal time is atemporal; an eternal now. To speak of atemporal or timeless time is paradoxical, but the paradox can be relieved if we see that primal time focuses on causal rather than chronological sequence; for primal peoples, "past" means preeminently closer to the originating Source of things. That the Source precedes the present is of secondary importance.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

People , Time

“A movie about the past is not the same as the past.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 37 (p. 235)

“Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"The Bright Field", p. 60
Laboratories of the Spirit (1975)

Life , Youth , Imagination , Future

“We are all the sum total of our pasts, good and evil.”

Glen Cook book She Is the Darkness

Source: She Is the Darkness (1997), Chapter 95 (p. 614)

Evil

“The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: (1940), V

Heart

“You Own Your Own Life…
To lose your Life is to lose your Future, to lose your Liberty is to lose your Present
…and to lose the product of your Life and Liberty is to lose that portion of your Past that produced it
A product of your Life and Liberty is your Property.”

Ken Schoolland (1950) American academic

The Philosophy of Liberty http://www.facebook.com/yourRights

Life , Future

“I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state "I hurt" or "I hate" or "I want." Or, indeed, "Look at me." And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.”

Anita Brookner (1928–2016) British novelist and art historian.

Look At Me (1983)

Love , Hate , World , Business

“Both the Jacobins and Bolsheviks butchered their upper ruling classes and executed their royal families. They broke with Christianity and waged war on it, intending to wipe it off the face of the earth. They succeeded in involving the people of the nations in wars fought with energy and enthusiasm - the revolutionary wars of the past, the war against Germany today. Their theories and revolutionary ideas had enormous influence beyond the borders of their own countries. The methods of National Socialism are different, but basically they too pursue a single idea: the extermination and annihilation of people who think differently from them.”

Wilm Hosenfeld (1895–1952) Righteous Among the Nations

Szpilman, The Pianist, page 193. Diary entry, 18 January 1942.

War , People , Family , Idea

“We want a man whose life and opinions embody all the achievements of which I have spoken. We want a man who, standing on a mountain height, traces the victorious footsteps of our party in the past, and, carrying in his heart the memory of its glorious deeds, looks forward prepared to meet the dangers to come. We want one who will act in no spirit of unkindness toward those we lately met in battle.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1880s, Speech Nominating John Sherman for President (1880)

Life , Mountain , Memory , Victory

“Lately some picked graduates from Canada are beginning to play their part in looking after those parts of the Empire where the white man goes out, often alone, to teach, to educate and to bring along the more backward races of Empire. There is no more self-sacrificing work, there is no finer work, and you see Canadians to-day in the Sudan, Malaya, Mauritius, and in the colonial service generally—medical men, highly educated men in the Civil Service, helping to bear the white man's burden. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that it is not enough for a country to concentrate solely on making a lot of money for itself; that a real spiritual force comes into it when its sons are ready, as for generations Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen have been ready, to give up the comforts and ease of home life and go out on that pioneer work to bring forward those backward parts of the world and try to help them to benefit from the things that have profited us to much in the years past.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Canadian Club in Toronto (6 August 1927), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 75-76.
1927

Life , Men , Money , World

“Every riot is followed by an Inquiry Committee, but its report is never published. Take U. P. for instance. A report in the Times of India of 13.12.1990 from Lucknow says: “At least a dozen judicial inquiry reports into the genesis of communal riots in the state have never seen the light of the day. They have been buried in the secretariat-files over the past two decades. The failure of the successive state governments to publish these reports and initiate action has given credence to the belief that they are not serious about checking communal violence… There were other instances when the state government instituted an inquiry and then scuttled the commissions. In the 1982 and 1986 clashes in Meerut and in the 1986 riots in Allahabad, the judicial inquiries were ordered only as an ‘eye-wash’…” Judicial inquiries are ordered as an eye-wash because the perpetrators of riots are known but cannot be booked. In a secular state it is neither proper to name them nor political to punish them. Inquiry committee reports are left to gather dust, while those who should be punished are pampered and patronised as vote-banks in India’s democratic setup. Therefore communal riots in India as a legacy of Muslim rule may continue to persist. If these could help in partitioning the country, they could still help in achieving many other goals.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 8

Books , Communication , Failure , Light

“Why should five hundred or six hundred titled persons govern us, and why should their children govern our children for ever? I invite a reply from the apologists and the admirers of the House of Lords. I invite them to show any ground of reason, or of logic, or of expediency or practical common sense in defence of the institution which has taken the predominant part during the last few days in the politics of our country. There is no defence, and there is no answer, except that the House of Lords…has survived out of the past. It is a lingering relic of a feudal order. It is the remains, the solitary reminder of a state of things and of a balance of forces which has wholly passed away. I challenge the defenders, the backers, and the instigators of the House of Lords—I challenge them to justify and defend before the electors of the country the character and composition of the hereditary assembly.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 23
Early career years (1898–1929)

Children , Sense , Parting , Housing

“It seems to me they like to play up my faults. If I make a bad play, it seems to get more publicity than the good things I do. They always compare me with Paul Waner and things in the past. I didn't play ball 25 years ago. I'm playing now. I think I should be judged on this basis. I get tired of hearing that Waner was a better hitter than me. A lot of old fans tell me I field better, run faster and throw harder than Waner. Nobody says anything about that.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Change of Pace" by Bill Nunn, Jr. in The New Pittsburgh Courier (August 10, 1963), p. 22
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1963</big>

Thinking

“Freedom consists not only in the absence of restraint but also in the presence of opportunity. Liberty is not a single and simple conception. It has four elements – national, political, personal and economic. The man who is fully free is one who lives in a country which is independent; in a state which is democratic; in a society where laws are equal and restrictions at a minimum; in an economic system in which national interests are protected and the citizen has the scope of secure livelihood, an assured comfort and full opportunity to rise by merit.

This freedom, so truly and courageously defined, is not ours today and until this condition is reached, India will never achieve true greatness or happiness, based on the glorious features of her past civilisation.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Patna University Convocation on 27th November 1937.

Law , Courage , Freedom , Personality

“I see not a step before me as I tread on another year;
But I ’ve left the Past in God’s keeping,—the Future
His mercy shall clear;
And what looks dark in the distance may brighten as I draw near.”

Mary Gardiner Brainard (1837–1905) American poet

Not knowing, published in The Congregationalist, March 1869, and set to music as a hymn by Philip Paul Bliss in the 1870s. Thomas Corts, Glimpses of Christian History Presents More Stories: Blessed Bliss http://chi.gospelcom.net/lives_events/more/bliss.shtml, 2007.

God , Future , Drawing

“Anyone who thinks about the great questions of Christian theology soon finds out that a lot of them have already been addressed. It is virtually impossible to do theology as if it had never been done before. There is always an element of looking over one’s shoulder to see how things were done in the past, and what answers were then given. Part of the notion of “tradition” is a willingness to take seriously the theological heritage of the past.”

Alister McGrath (1953) Northern Irish priest and academic

Introduction.
Christian Theology: An Introduction

Question , Thinking , Parting

“In spring's own country, where the gardens blow,
You faded, tender rose! For hours now past,
Like butterflies departing, on you're cast
The worms of memories to work you woe.”

Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) Polish national poet, dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator, professor of Slavic literature, and polit…

"The Grave of the Countess Potocki" http://daisy.htmlplanet.com/amick.htm
Crimean Sonnets

Spring , Memory , Country

“If I choose to impose individual blame for all past social ills, there will be no one left to like in some of the most fascinating periods of our history. For example […] if I place every Victorian anti-Semite beyond the pale of my attention, my compass of available music and literature will be pitifully small. Though I hold no shred of sympathy for active persecution, I cannot excoriate individuals who acquiesced passively in a standard societal judgment. Rail instead against the judgment, and try to understand what motivates men of decent will.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"The Moral State of Tahiti—and of Darwin", p. 269
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Men , Music , History , Literature

“It is not crazy to want to know the past. It is only crazy to live there, like so many of the aristocracy.”

Jane Yolen book Briar Rose

Source: Briar Rose (1992), Chapter 24 (p. 131)

“Every unfulfilled aspiration of humanity in the past; all partial representation of perfect character; all sacrifices, nay, even those of idolatry, point to the fulfillment of what we want, the answer to every longing — the type of perfect humanity, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 55.

Christ , Perfection

“All the real money in investment will have to be made—as most of it has been in the past— not out of buying and selling but out of owning and holding securities, receiving interests and dividends therein, and benefiting from their long-term increases in value. Hence stockholder's major energies and wisdom as investors should be directed toward assuring themselves of the best operating results from their corporations. This in turn means assuring themselves of fully honest and competent managements.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter I, What the Intelligent Investor Can Accomplish, p. 17

Wisdom , Money

“The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)

Childhood

“Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.”

Iain Banks book Transition

Transition ISBN 0-316-73107-2 p. 86.
Non-Culture Novels, Transition (2009)

“It may remain for us to learn … that our task is only beginning; and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;—that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;—that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;—and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.”

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) writer

Source: Out of the East, pp. 156–7.

Death , Hunger , World , Error

“Generations of Rationalists and freethinkers have held that Jesus Christ corresponds to no historical character: There never was a Jesus of Nazareth. We might call this categorical denial “Jesus atheism.” What I am describing is something different, a “Jesus agnosticism.” There may have been a Jesus on earth in the past, but the state of the evidence is so ambiguous that we can never be sure what this figure was like or, indeed, whether there was such a person.”

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

Christ , Personality

“What might be called, perhaps somewhat grandiloquently, the Epistemological Question has received rather scant attention at the hands of economists. There are, of course, a number of epistemological questions, some of which lie more in the province of the philosopher than they do the economist or the social scientist. The one with which I am particularly concerned here is that of the role of knowledge in social systems, both as a product of the past and as a determinant of the future.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1960s, The economics of knowledge and the knowledge of economics, 1966, p. 1, cited in: Brian Chi-ang Lin (2007) " A New Vision of the Knowledge Economy http://newdoc.nccu.edu.tw/teasyllabus/205016255002/JOES%20(July%202007).pdf"

Lie , Question , Knowledge , Future

“The territorial state has not always existed in the past, so it need not necessarily exist in the future.”

Joseph Nye (1937) American political scientist

Source: Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (6th ed., 2006), Chapter 9, A New World Order?, p. 262.

Future

“For those who would like to throw off the burden of history and move on, Goldhagen’s book has been a welcome gift. Purporting to bring the past home to the unsuspecting present, he has had the opposite effect. If he has not yet asked himself why his book has received such an enthusiastic reception in Germany, he might ponder why ‘the Germans’ should be so glad to be supplied with the argument that their parents and grandparents were all equally to blame because they inhabited a culture blameworthy in itself: we’re different now. But nobody is that different now, because nobody was that different then.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Postscript to Hitler's Unwitting Exculpator
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

Books , Home , History , Parent

“I can't go back. The past won't go away in this family.”

Frank McCourt book 'Tis

'Tis (2000)

Family

“The time has come for me to forget my past and live a future that even I am unaware of.”

Protima Bedi (1948–1998) Indian model and dancer

When she left the Nitygram village quoted in "Bowing Out".

Time , Future , Forgetting

“I've always tried to go a step past wherever people expected me to end up. I'm not about to change now.”

Beverly Sills (1929–2007) opera soprano

Beverly : An Autobiography (1988), p. 356

People , Change

“I've seen the future and it will be
I've seen the future and it works
If there's life after, we will see
So I can't go like a jerk
Systematic overthrow of the underclass
Hollywood conjures images of the past
New world needs spirituality that will last
I've seen the future and it will be.”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

The Future
Song lyrics, Batman (1989)

Life , World , Jerk , Future

“Is the very mechanism for the universe to come into being meaningless or unworkable or both unless the universe is guaranteed to produce life, consciousness and observership somewhere and for some little time in its history-to-be? The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what the observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past—even in a past so remote that life did not then exist, and shows even more, that 'observership' is a prerequisite for any useful version of 'reality.”

John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) American physicist

As quoted by Paul Davies, Other Worlds (1980)

Life , History , Reality , Sense

“We must also remember that we did not win (2018 Malaysian general election) easily, and after becoming the government, we need to do what is best for the people. It is not impossible for us to lose the nation's leadership if we slack and repeat the mistakes of the past government.”

Wan Azizah Wan Ismail (1952) Malaysian politician

Wan Azizah Wan Ismail (2018) cited in " Wan Azizah reiterates plan to step down once Anwar becomes PM https://www.nst.com.my/news/nation/2018/09/412288/wan-azizah-reiterates-plan-step-down-once-anwar-becomes-pm" on New Straits Times, 17 September 2018

People

“Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and and spoken for the other. A visitor looked under black beams, through leaded casements (past apple boughs, past box, past chairs like bath-tubs on broomsticks) to a lawn ornamented with one of the statues of David Smith; in the months since the figure had been put in its place a shrike had deserted for it a neighboring thorn tree, and an archer had skinned her leg against its farthest spike. On the table in the President’s waiting-room there were copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine—a little magazine—that had no name. One walked by a mahogany hat-rack, glanced at the coat of arms on an umbrella-stand, and brushed with one’s sleeve something that gave a ghostly tinkle—four or five black and orange ellipsoids, set on grey wires, trembled in the faint breeze of the air-conditioning unit: a mobile. A cloud passed over the sun, and there came trailing from the gymnasium, in maillots and blue jeans, a melancholy procession, four dancers helping to the infirmary a friend who had dislocated her shoulder in the final variation of The Eye of Anguish.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1: “The President, Mrs., and Derek Robbins”, p. 3; opening paragraph of novel

Smile , History , Idea , Tree

“The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.”

William Gibson book All Tomorrow's Parties

Source: All Tomorrow's Parties‎ (2003), Ch. 4 : Formal Absences of Precious Things, p. 21

Future

“History is nothing whatever but a record of what living persons have done in the past.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Give Me Liberty (1936)

History , Personality

“And Mr. Burnaby said acutely: "Well, it doesn't seem to have done her much good, poor lass." But after a while they stopped talking about her and discussed instead who was going to win the Grand National. For, as Mr. Ferguson was saying at that minute in Luxor, it is not the past that matters but the future.”

Agatha Christie book Death on the Nile

Death on the Nile (1937)

Future

“The weaving of mankind into one community does not imply the creation of a homogeneous community, but rather the reverse; the welcome and adequate utilization of distinctive quality in an atmosphere of understanding… Communities all to one pattern, like boxes of toy soldiers, are things of the past, rather than of the future.”

H. G. Wells book The Outline of History

The Outline of History (1920)

Communication , Understanding , Future , Box

“I follow the works of Iranian artists even now, sometimes in Paris or in New York and I am happy Iranian artists are still great. Whether they are men or women, they have always been great. Despite all the pressure and censorship inside the country, they haven't been able to stop the creativity of our artists. Some have to work underground, like in cinema, and sometimes their work has political messages, but the number of our artists now has definitely grown in comparison to the past.”

Farah Pahlavi (1938) Empress of Iran

Former queen of Iran on assembling Tehran's art collection http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/01/queen-iran-art-collection, The Guardian, (August 1, 2012).
Interviews

Women , Men , Country , Happiness

“The respondents in this case insist that a difficult question of public policy must be taken from the reach of the voters, and thus removed from the realm of public discussion, dialogue, and debate in an election campaign. Quite in addition to the serious First Amendment implications of that position with respect to any particular election, it is inconsistent with the underlying premises of a responsible, functioning democracy. One of those premises is that a democracy has the capacity—and the duty—to learn from its past mistakes; to discover and confront persisting biases; and by respectful, rationale deliberation to rise above those flaws and injustices. That process is impeded, not advanced, by court decrees based on the proposition that the public cannot have the requisite repose to discuss certain issues. It is demeaning to the democratic process to presume that the voters are not capable of deciding an issue of this sensitivity on decent and rational grounds. The process of public discourse and political debate should not be foreclosed even if there is a risk that during a public campaign there will be those, on both sides, who seek to use racial division and discord to their own political advantage. An informed public can, and must, rise above this. The idea of democracy is that it can, and must, mature. Freedom embraces the right, indeed the duty, to engage in a rational, civic discourse in order to determine how best to form a consensus to shape the destiny of the Nation and its people.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 572 U. S. ____, (2016), plurality opinion.

People , Democracy , Idea , Question

“Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

In Memory of M. B.

Pain , Fate

“If we are to put interrogators to work in defence of liberal values, their role in the community must receive proper recognition. They will require intensive counselling to overcome the inevitable traumas that this difficult work involves. They must be enabled to see themselves as dedicated workers in the cause of progress. Psychotherapy must be available to help them avoid the negative self-image from which some torturers have suffered in the past.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

A Modest Proposal (2003)

Communication , Suffering , Help

“There is one kind of judge. There is an independent judge under our Constitution. And the fact that they may have been a Republican or Democrat or an independent in a past life is completely irrelevant to how they conduct themselves as judges. And I think two centuries of experience has shown us that that ideal which the Founders established can be realized and has been realized and will continue to be realized.”

Brett Kavanaugh (1965) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination OF Brett M. Kavanaugh to be Ciruit Judge for the District of Columbia Circuit https://www.congress.gov/108/chrg/shrg24853/CHRG-108shrg24853.htm (April 27, 2004)

Life , Thinking

“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”

Walter Benjamin book Theses on the Philosophy of History

Variant translation:
To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
As translated by Dennis Redmond (2001)
Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)
Context: To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Way , Memory

“A mightier force than ever followed Grant or Lee has leveled both their hosts, raised up an united Nation, and made us all partakers of a new glory. It is not for us to forget the past but to remember it, that we may profit by it. But it is gone; we can not change it. We must put our emphasis on the present and put into effect the lessons the past has taught us.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Democracy of Sports (1924)

Change , Forgetting

“Once he’d been in his twenties, looking forward. Now he was a shade past fifty, and what he looked back on was subtly less satisfactory than what he had looked forward to.”

Algis Budrys (1931–2008) American writer

The Executioner, p. 122 (originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, January 1956)
The Unexpected Dimension (1960)

“The peoples of Europe are a work in progress and always must be… The history of the people of Europe has not ended -- it never will. Ethnogenesis is a process of the present and future as much as it is the past. No efforts of romantics, politicians, or social scientists can preserve once and for all some essential soul of a people or nation. Nor can any effort ensure that nations, ethnic groups, and communities of today will not vanish utterly in the future. The past may have set the parameters within which one can build the future, but it cannot determine what that future must be.”

Patrick J. Geary (1948) historian

Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, Princeton University Press, 2003

People , Soul , History , Communication

“The ascent of man into heaven is not the key, but rather his ascent here into the spirit and the descent also of the Spirit into his normal humanity and the transformation of this earthly nature. For that and not some post mortem salvation is the real new birth for which humanity waits as the crowning movement of its long obscure and painful course…. Therefore the individuals who will most help the future of humanity in the new age will be those who will recognise a spiritual evolution as the destiny and therefore the great need of the human being…. They will especially not make the mistake of thinking that this change can be effected by machinery and outward institutions; they will know and never forget that it has to be lived out by each man inwardly or it can never be made a reality for the kind…. Failures must be originally numerous in everything great and difficult, but the time comes when the experience of past failures can be profitably used and the gate that so long resisted opens. In this as in all great human aspirations and endeavours, an a priori declaration of impossibility is a sign of ignorance and weakness, and the motto of the aspirant's endeavour must be the solvitur ambulando of the discoverer. For by the doing the difficulty will be solved. A true beginning has to be made; the rest is a work for Time in its sudden achievements or its long patient labour….”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

July, 1918
India's Rebirth

Pain , Age , Birth , Failure

“We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past. We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments. … Our goal is stability, not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country. It's time.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, December
Source: Speaking at U.S. Bank Arena, as reported by Washington Examiner, December 1, 2016 http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trumps-new-foreign-policy-we-will-stop-looking-to-topple-regimes/article/2608687

Learning , Time , Country

“But I thought: Of course -- Lyman was representing my own ideas about something else too; the overly gullible people who parade as skeptics. All many of them need is a word they've been some big shot in a past life, or known some famous person, and presto, they're confirmed "believers." People like that -- like the boy on the phone -- never trust their own vision.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 13

Life , People , Boy , Idea

“In daily practical experience, try to concentrate for a while upon seemingly subordinate abilities, ones that you think of as latent. If you do so consistently, using your imagination and will, then those abilities will become prominent in your present. The current beliefs will reprogram and alter past experience. It is not simply that past, forgotten, unconsciously perceived events will be put together in a new way and organized under a new heading, but in that past (now not perceivable), the entire bodily response to seemingly past events will change.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Nature of Personal Reality (1974), p. 359

Way , Imagination , Thinking , Change

“The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

Comment

Art

“Jack didn’t have the resources or the stomach lining to fight Marvel over copyrights, character ownership or past contractual sleights that he believed he suffered.”

Jack Kirby (1917–1994) American comic book artist, writer and editor

Mark Evanier, "Jack Kirby, the abandoned hero of Marvel's grand Hollywood adventure, and his family's quest" http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/jack-kirby-the-forgotten-hero-in-marvels-grand-hollywood-adventure/, Los Angeles Times, (September 25, 2009).
About

Suffering , Fight

“The Democratic Party was the party of slavery and Jim Crow, and the 'Solid South' was solidly Democratic for one hundred years. All of the racism that we associate with that region originated with and was enforced by elected Democrats. It could not have been otherwise, there were virtually no Republicans in power in the south for a century after the end of Reconstruction… Redress a larger historical imbalance in the way people perceive the two major political parties. Democrats have been effectively cleansed of their racist past, their sins implicitly transferred to the Republicans.”

Bruce Bartlett (1951) American historian

Source: 2000s, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past (2008), p. xiii

People , Way

“I think we’ve got the risks pretty well characterized. I think we are at least avoiding the mistakes that have been made in the past.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

Thinking

“We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more?”

John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) American physicist

"The Anthropic Universe" http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-anthropic-universe/3302686 (Feb 18, 2006) Australia's Science Show, with Martin Redfern moderating excerpts from several scientists, including Wheeler. Audio recording http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2006/02/ssw_20060218_1200.mp3 and transcript available. See also same show at WayBack Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20080616183602/http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1572643.htm Internet archive.org.

Sense , Universe , Distant

“a man whose life is so boring that if it flashed past he wouldn't be in it”

David Lange (1942–2005) New Zealand politician and 32nd Prime Minister of New Zealand

Referring to former Labour Party member Peter Dunne.
Source: [Pryor, Nicole, Rare stumble by political chameleon, 8 June 2013, The Press, 8 June 2013, A16]

Life