Quotes about the past
page 3

“I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.”
"Prairie" (1918)
Source: Cornhuskers

“Our past may explain why we're suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.”
Source: Battlefield of the Mind: Winning the Battle in Your Mind

“Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.”
Mrs Cheveley, Act I
Usually quoted as: No man is rich enough to buy back his own past.
Source: An Ideal Husband (1895)

The Power of Now (1997)
Source: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
This famous statement has produced many paraphrases and variants:
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.
Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.
Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.
There is a similar quote by Edmund Burke (in Revolution in France) that often leads to misattribution: "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors."
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense
Source: The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One
Context: Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

“The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.”
Source: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

“Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future.”


“Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the past.”
J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 146
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be…”
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose


“We cannot change the history of the past.”

“The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.”
Source: The Masterpiece
Source: Journal of a Solitude

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Page 106; from a notebook entry (1937).
Sergei Prokofiev: Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences (1960)

Posthumous attributions, Tupac: Resurrection (2003)
Variant: I don't feel like what I did was so evil, I just feel like the way I was living and my mentality was a part of my progression to be a man.

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture
Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.29

Disputed, No Woman, No Cry, from the album Natty Dread (1974)

(1964) Post-election statement. Virginia Morell, Ancestral Passions: The leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings, Copyright 1995, Chapter 19, beginning.

Dick Gregory's Political Primer (Harper & Row, 1972), p. 262.

2015, State of the Union Address (January 2015)

“Simpletons talk of the past, wise men of the present, and fools of the future.”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

2017, Farewell Address (January 2017)

1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)

As quoted in Benjamin Franta, "On its 100th birthday in 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming, The Guardian, 1 January 2018.

1900s, Inaugural Address (1905)

Source: Reason for Hope: a Spiritual Journey (2000), p. 189

Source: Essai de semantique, 1897, p. 104-5 ; as cited in: Schaff (1962:14).

Remarks by the President in YSEALI Town Hall at Taylor's University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (November 20, 2015) https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/11/20/remarks-president-yseali-town-hall
2015
Address to Zenana Muslim League, at Curzon Hall of Dhaka, 23 March 1948[citation needed]

James Tobin, "Keynes' Policies in Theory and Practice", Challenge (1983).
1970s and later

Paris 1923
As quoted by Marius de Zayas, in 'The Arts', New York, May 1923
Quotes, 1920's, "Picasso Speaks," 1923

“For me, art has neither past nor future. All I have ever made was for the present.”
Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd
Attributed from posthumous publications

Source: 1920s, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 8: Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness

“There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.”
56
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (7 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 214
Non-Fiction, Letters

Speech before the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island (June 1897), reported in "Washington’s Forgotten Maxim", American Ideals (1926), vol. 13 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed., chapter 12, p. 198
1890s

Todo o romance é isso, desespero, intento frustrado de que o passado não seja coisa definitivamente perdida. Só não se acabou ainda de averiguar se é o romance que impede o homem de esquecer-se ou se é a impossibilidade do esquecimento que o leva a escrever romances.
Source: The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), p. 47

Canto II
1840s, My Childhood's Home I See Again (1844 - 1846)

As quoted in "A Role About Winter for Julie Christie, a Star in Eternal Spring]" by Alan Riding in The New York Times (18 April 2007)
Source: Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954), p. 147

Univision forum, , quoted in [2012-09-20, Obama: ‘You Can’t Change Washington From The Inside’, Noah, Rothman, Mediaite.com, http://www.mediaite.com/tv/obama-you-cant-change-washington-from-the-inside/, 2012-09-21]
2012

“Pleasure is always in the past or in the future, never in the present.”
Il piacere è sempre o passato o futuro, non mai presente.
29th September 1823, Festival of Saint Michael the Archangel.
Zibaldone (1898)

Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 416-417
Non-Fiction, Letters

2014, Address to European Youth (March 2014)

[citation needed]
Others

Letter to Richard Nixon (December 15, 1971) http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2005/07/03/stories/2005070300090100.htm.
“Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.”
Source: Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977), p. 83
The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

Elinor Ostrom (2009) "Nobel Prize Lecture", December 8.

Concepts

2015, Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the 13th Amendment (December 2015)

1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)

“So spread the word cause I'm promoting my past until I'm passed out.”
"Rhyme or Reason"
2010s, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013)

Section 167
2010s, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel

On History (1904)
1900s

Mais, quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir.<p>Et dès que j’eus reconnu le goût du morceau de madeleine trempé dans le tilleul que me donnait ma tante (quoique je ne susse pas encore et dusse remettre à bien plus tard de découvrir pourquoi ce souvenir me rendait si heureux), aussitôt la vieille maison grise sur la rue, où était sa chambre, vint comme un décor de théâtre.
"Overture"
In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol I: Swann's Way (1913)

2014, Address to European Youth (March 2014)

BBC radio broadcast, March 28, 1949. http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library/special_collections/hoyle/exhibition/radio/ Reprinted in April 1949 in The Listener, a BBC magazine.

2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall Speech (November 2014)

Disputed

Concepts

“It is easier to criticize than to correct our past errors.”
Book XXX, sec. 30
History of Rome