“Remember this also: it’s always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.”
Source: Go Set a Watchman
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Harper Lee 142
American author 1926–2016Related quotes

“The Master is not concerned with what we believe — only with what we see.”
Non-Instruction
One Minute Wisdom (1989)

The Future of Civilization (1938)
Context: We see the world as it is now, after these defeats of the League, and we can compare it with what it was six or seven years ago. The comparison is certainly depressing; the contrast is terrible. And we have not yet reached a time when we can estimate the full material losses and human suffering which have been the direct result of the ambitions of one set of powers and the weakness of the others. Nor is there any purpose in attempting to do so. Let us, rather, examine where we now stand and what steps we ought to take in order to strengthen the international system and thrust back again the forces of reaction.
In the first place, let us admit that the first ten years of the League were in a sense unnatural. The horror of war to which I have already alluded was necessarily far more vivid than it can be expected long to remain. That tremendous argument for peace, the horror of war, was a diminishing asset. Most of us, at that time, were, I think, quite well aware that unless we could get the international system into solidly effective working order in the first ten years, we were likely to have great difficulties in the succeeding period, and so it has proved.

Whatever you do, Brian, don't mention the deficit, Irish Independent, 3 December 2008, 2010-06-12 http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/whatever-you-do-brian-dont-mention-the-deficit-1561099.html,
Cowen's unwillingness to clarify in the Dáil, the post budget deficit.
2008
Source: Hidden Order - How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), Ch 3. Echoing Emergence, p. 97