“The girl with a future avoids a man with a past. ”

Source: Heart of Darkness

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Message to Chairman Khrushchev Concerning the Meaning of Events in Cuba (18 April 1961).
1961

As quoted in "Diderot" in The Great Infidels (1881) by Robert Green Ingersoll; The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll Vol. III (1900), p. 367
Context: The more man ascends through the past, and the more he launches into the future, the greater he will be, and all these philosophers and ministers and truth-telling men who have fallen victims to the stupidity of nations, the atrocities of priests, the fury of tyrants, what consolation was left for them in death? This: That prejudice would pass, and that posterity would pour out the vial of ignominy upon their enemies. O Posterity! Holy and sacred stay of the unhappy and the oppressed; thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who findest the good man, who unmaskest the hypocrite, who breakest down the tyrant, may thy sure faith, thy consoling faith never, never abandon me!

Jace to Clary, pg. 317
The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

As quoted in Treasury of Thought (1872) by Maturin M. Ballou, p. 521

Variant translation: When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.
Book Four, Chapter VIII
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Four

Source: Martin Eden