“There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.”
The Opening to the Future http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/ag/legacy/2011/01/20/06-08-1964.pdf (1964)
Context: To say that the future will be different from the present is, to scientists, hopelessly self-evident. I observe regretfully that in politics, however, it can be heresy. It can be denounced as radicalism, or branded as subversion. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. It hardly seems necessary to point out in California - of all States -- that change, although it involves risks, is the law of life.
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Robert F. Kennedy 72
American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy 1925–1968Related quotes

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

Source: The Image of the Future, 1973, p. 1 (partly cited in: European Centre for Leisure and Education (1975) Society and leisure. Vol. 7. p. 22)
Spark (2014)
Context: True ideology has vanished, replaced by fear and fantasy. The right wing wants corporate control and a return to a past that never existed. The left wing wants government control and a future that will never exist. Both groups lose sight of the essential questions: how can the individual speak and think and create freely? New ideas are the only evolutionary force that will save us from destruction.

The Path to Love: Spiritual Strategies for Healing, p. 170

“I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future.”
Preface to Humane Biology Projects (1961) by the Animal Welfare Institute
Context: I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives.

"The Genealogy of Animals", p. 85
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Physical Kinship