“My next proposition is, that we have a right to argue from the past to the future and to say, that if in the past the North has done this, in the future, if it shall acquire the power to abolish slavery, it will do it.”
Speech to the Virginia Convention (1861)
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Henry L. Benning12
Confederate Army general 1814–1875Related quotes
Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist
Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 29
“It's up to you now, and we shall help you — that my past does not become your future.”
Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor
Speech at the UN World Peace Day (21 September 2006) New York, Speech in UN Webcast (00:16:35) http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/specialevents/se050921.rm
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States
Source: Tomorrow Is Now (1963), p. xv
Context: We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future. Spinoza, I think, pointed out that we ourselves can make experience valuable when, by imagination and reason, we turn it into foresight.
Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture
Free Culture (2004)
Context: A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now. Like Stallman's arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today. It is against that extremism that this book is written.
“We are what the past has made us. We are what the future will make us. Live now. Right now.”
Tom Hiddleston (1981) English actor, producer and musical performer
Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War
Speech in the House of Commons, June 18, 1940 "War Situation" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1940/jun/18/war-situation#column_52. <br class="br">The Second World War (1939–1945)
“It is obvious: The past was once the future and the future will become the past.”
Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)