Past Quotes

Arbor Day is not like other holidays. Each of those reposes on the past, while Arbor Day proposes for the future.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

I've had a pilot every single year that didn't sell for the past four years, that'll smack you in the back of the head. I had a really good one last year; I wouldn't have done the play in New York if I had gotten that one.

I am fascinated with times past.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.

They say miracles are past.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.

Even God cannot change the past.

Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future.

I cannot take back one word or action; the past does not change for anyone.

Over the past few years, many of us have increasingly begun to question the direction and meaning of our society as it has developed over the past several centuries.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

Despite the increase in world attention toward Sudan in the past months, the genocide in Darfur has continued without any serious attempt by the Sudanese government to do what governments primarily exist to do, protect their citizens.

The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.

Creation is not taking place now, so far as can be observed. Therefore, it was accomplished sometime in the past, if at all, and thus is inaccessible to the scientific method.

I come from a very working-class background, so my family would have been downstairs in the past, as opposed to upstairs. People are often quite surprised to hear that, that I'm not actually posh.

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don't get past the third paragraph you've wasted your energy and valuable ink.

What lingers from the parent's individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.

The coolest thing I've gotten to do in the past few years is guest star on Sesame Street.

I do sometimes strongly hope that in a past life, my most recent life before this, I was absolutely horrible, evil, hideous. Because otherwise - well, hell, to even things up next time around, I'm going to have to pay for this one, am I not?

It's an unfortunate situation. After such a great play I felt like I got hit late, no flag, broke my hand. That's it. That's pretty much been the story for the past three weeks, and obviously at some point something catastrophic was going to happen, and I broke my hand.

Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose.

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.