Best 10290 quotes in «past quotes» category

It is not incumbent on the world to conform to your vision of change. It is up to you to explain the future in terms that those living in the past and present can follow.

It is not often that nations learn from the past,even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.

It is not possible in this culture today to hold up to public pillory and ridicule any group - whether blacks, American Indians, women, homosexuals, Poles, or any of a number of other groups that have been discriminated against in the past. However, the one group you can hold up to public mockery and pillory without fear of reprisal is evangelical Christians.

It is not often that nations learn from the past even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it. For the lessons of historical experience, as of personal experience, are contingent. They teach the consequences of certain actions, but they cannot force a recognition of comparable situations.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.

It is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone. Even this burden, too, can be lessened if you confine it strictly to its own limits.

It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.

... it isn't in my nature to cry for very long. It is one of the blessings of my life that things that are past -- are past. Yesterday's calamities are merely today's challenge. I can get down -- but I can't stay there.

It is obvious that the fascist mass pestilence, with its background of thousands of years, cannot be mastered with social measures corresponding to the past three hundred years. The discovery of the natural biological work democracy in international human intercourse is the answer to fascism. This will be no less true even if not one of the living sex-economists, orgone biophysicists or work democrats should live to see its general functioning and its victory over the irrationalism in social life.

It isn't the great big pleasures that count the most; it's making a great deal out of the little ones--I've discovered the true secret of happiness, Daddy, and that is to live in the now. Not to be for ever regretting the past, or anticipating the future; but to get the most that you can out of this very instant.

It isn't good to hold on too hard to the past. You can't spend your whole life looking back. Not even when you can't see what lies ahead. All you can do is keep on keeping on, and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should be—even if it isn't what you expected.

It is of little use for us to pay lip-loyalty to the mighty men of the past unless we sincerely endeavor to apply to the problems of the present precisely the qualities which in other crises enabled the men of that day to meet those crises.

It is only after a fair portion of one's life that one really knows what are the things that matter, the things that will remain until the end.

It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.

It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.

It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history.

It is past time for the U.S. government to fully fulfill our moral obligation to those who have fought for freedom and democracy.

It is possible to reclaim your future, to build a happy life despite an imperfect past. We can order the universe to our will and mind.

It is painful to be consciously of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness. I am not afraid to live on and on, if only I do not have to remember too much. A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.

It is partly the absence of recorded history which sends women now to the lives of women past for the detailed documentation of their daily lives.

It is past all question, and agreed on by all sides, that no religion will save a man who is not serious, sincere, and diligent in it. If thou be of the truest religion in the world, and are not true thyself to that religion, the religion is good, but it is none of thine.

It is past all controversy that what costs dearest is, and ought to be, most valued.

It is probably well on the conservative side to estimate that during the past ten to fifteen years the camera has destroyed a thousand pairs of eyes, corrupted ten thousand, and seriously deceived a hundred thousand, for every one pair that it has opened, and taught.

It is said that the American vocabulary has declined by half in the past few decades. It's a tragic instance of desertification following upon monocultural commodity production, the clear-cutting of written and spoken English.

It is quite difficult to establish a clear-cut cause-and-effect relationship, as the causes are manifold and closely connected. It is simply not correct to link the level of democracy to prosperity. It is absolutely clear that the economic wealth of Saudi Arabia exceeds the performance of the Czech Republic. But apparently democracy is quite stable in the Czech Republic, which cannot be said about Saudi Arabia. As we delve into the past, we must not forget about the existing model of society.

It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life.

It is sometimes said that because of our past we, as a people, expect too much and set our sights too high. That is not the way I see it. Rather it seems to me that throughout my life in politics our ambitions have steadily shrunk. Our response to disappointment has not been to lengthen our stride but to shorten the distance to be covered. But with confidence in ourselves and in our future what a nation we could be!

It is still open for me, as well as you, to regulate my behavior, by my experience of past events.

It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history.

It is strange to talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.

It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.

It is the link from the present to the past that gives us a spirit to address the future.

It is the mass dream of inverted self, populous with fears overt and secret, that forms the continuous but gossamer thread upon which are strung as phantom beads all civilizations from the remotest past of record to that of the present day and hour.

It is, then, by those shadows of the hoary Past and their fantastic silhouettes on the external screen of every religion and philosophy, that we can, by checking them as we go along, and comparing them, trace out finally the body that produced them.

It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

It is time to leave behind the divisive battles of the past. It is time to move forward as one nation.

It is to live twice when we can enjoy the recollections of our former life.

It is true that the present is powerfully shaped by the past. But it is also true that ... insight at any age keeps us from singing the same sad songs again.

It is true that every being is enjoying life or suffering as a direct result of his or her own past actions. The animals in the factory farms may have been meat-eating human beings in a previous birth; we don't know, and it is not our place to judge.

It is true that I should have been surprised in the past to learn that Professor Hardy had joined the Oxford Group. But one could not say the adverse chance was 1:10. Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad, and then this particular event would be quite likely.

It is time Britain put its trust back into the Labour Party. I believe I am the candidate that can make this happen precisely because I am not associated with the past.

It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future.

It is to be kept in mind that the generations of men do not wait for the convenience of the church in respect to their evangelization. Men are born and die whether or not Christians are ready to give them the Gospel. And hence, if the church of any generation does not evangelize the heathen of that generation, those heathen will never be evangelized at all. It is always true in the work of evangelization that the present can never anticipate the future, and that the future can never replace the past. What is to be done in soul saving must be done by that generation.

It is true that all of us are the beneficiaries of crimes committed by our ancestors, and it is true that nothing can be done about that now because the victims are dead and the survivors are innocent. These are good reasons for keeping our mouths shut about the past: but tell me, what are our reasons for silence about atrocities still to come?

It is up to us, to everyone at Celtic Park, to build up our own legends. We don't want to live with history, to be compared with legends from the past. We must make new legends.

It is unacceptable that the way we have treated people who have become addicted in the past is by throwing them in prison. It's appropriate that we're responding now by trying to get people the treatment they so desperately need. The racial divide here is absolutely unacceptable, and we have to do much better for all people who are addicted whether they are white, black, brown, any race - the humane way to respond to addiction is in a public health fashion and by getting people the help they need.

It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a  person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

It is when their age of passions is past that great men produce their masterpieces, just as it is after volcanic eruptions that the soil is most fertile.