“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

— Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

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Marshall McLuhan 416

Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor … 1911–1980

Gareth Morgan (1943) Organizational theorist

Morgan (1988) Riding the waves of change: developing managerial competencies for a turbulent world. p. 4

“I have no intention of retaliating or looking backwards. We are going to forget the past and look forward to the future.”

Jomo Kenyatta (1893–1978) First prime minister and first president of Kenya

“We never escape our past. It is mirrored in our present. It repeats itself in our future.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Marius Melville in Ch. 17
Cassidy (1986)

“We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 4 (1971); as quoted in Journal of Phenomenological Psychology Vol. 15 (1984)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Context: We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.

“If we look backward, we seem to discern clear signs of progress; if we look forward, we discern nothing but the veil. Science is but organized experience, and experience of the future we have none.”

Edward Walter Maunder (1851–1928) English astronomer studying sunspots

Context: It seems impossible to believe that Life, so rare a fruit of the universe, intelligent Life, conscious Life, to which the long course of evolution has been so manifestly leading up all through the long ages, should have no better destiny than a final and hopeless extinction; that this Earth and all the efforts and aspirations of the long generations of men should have no worthier end than to swing, throughout the eternal ages, an empty, frozen heap of dust, circling round the extinct cinder that was once its Sun. If we look backward, we seem to discern clear signs of progress; if we look forward, we discern nothing but the veil. Science is but organized experience, and experience of the future we have none.