“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”

— John F. Kennedy

Variant: Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

Last update Nov. 2, 2021. History

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John F. Kennedy 469

35th president of the United States of America 1917–1963

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“But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”

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

1963, Address in the Assembly Hall at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt
Variant: Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
Documents on International Affairs, 1963, Royal Institute of International Affairs, ed. Sir John Wheeler Wheeler-Bennett, p. 36.

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“It would seem like the present. He has a broader present. But his present lies ahead, not back. Our present is related to the past. Only the past is certain, to us. To him, the future is certain.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

The Golden Man (1954)
Context: "He can look ahead. See what's coming. He can — prethink. Let's call it that. He can see into the future. Probably he doesn't perceive it as the future."
"No," Anita said thoughtfully. "It would seem like the present. He has a broader present. But his present lies ahead, not back. Our present is related to the past. Only the past is certain, to us. To him, the future is certain. And he probably doesn't remember the past, any more than any animal remembers what happened."
"As he develops," Baines said, "as his race evolves, it'll probably expand its ability to prethink. Instead of ten minutes, thirty minutes. Then an hour. A day. A year. Eventually they'll be able to keep ahead a whole lifetime. Each one of them will live in a solid, unchanging world. There'll be no variables, no uncertainty. No motion! They won't have anything to fear. Their world will be perfectly static, a solid block of matter."
"And when death comes," Anita said, "they'll accept it. There won't be any struggle; to them, it'll already have happened."

“It is not easy to be wise for all times, not event for the present much less for the future; and those who judge the past must recollect that, when it was the present the present was future”

Gouverneur Morris (1752–1816) American politician

Gouverneur Morris to Robert Walsh ( February 5, 1811 http://www.bgdlegal.com/clientuploads/Publications/Publications/John%20Bush%20-%20Gouverneur%20Morris.pdf)
1810s

“It was never too late to learn something. The past is unalterable in any event. The future is the only thing we can change. Learning the lessons of the past is the only way to shape the present and the future.”

Jim Butcher book Ghost Story

Source: Ghost Story

“The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.”

Yukio Mishima book The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Source: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“But we can't escape into the future like we can escape into the past. So those of us who are not certain of things, and there are an awful lot of us, often rush back to the past. And each one has a particular past he prefers to the present. Sometimes I feel that any past is preferable to the present.”

Tom Baker (1934) English actor

“The real is the present, conceived not as a mathematical point between the present and the past, but as the union of present and past in a duration or permanence that is at the same time change. Thus the past as past and the future as future do not exist at all, but are purely ideal; the past as living in the present and the future as germinating in the present are wholly real and indeed are just the present itself. It is because of the presence of these two elements in the present… that the present is a concrete and changing reality and not an empty mathematical point.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: "Some Perplexities about time: with an attempted solution" (1925), p. 149. as cited in: Jonathan Gorman, "The transmission of our understanding of historical time." Historia Social y de la Educación 1.2 (2012): 129-152.

“Was life like that? You could look ahead to the future or back to the past, but the present moved too quickly to absorb.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

“It’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Source: Aleph

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”

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John F. Kennedy 469

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