Past Quotes

I think the rules are going to have to change for me to ever run for public office. My checkered past will always keep me out of politics.

I have been determined for the past couple of years to move away from all those Holiday programmes.

As I said a moment ago, there is no higher priority in our budget, or certainly in the budgets of the past few years, than providing for what is needed for the protection and security of our country and support of our troops.

On his own okay, Bush has authorized eavesdropping on as many as a thousand people over the past three years, with some of those intercepts being purely domestic, the New York Times reported.

I love being able to escape my past, even though my past was great.

We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship, to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we'll do it not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that bring people to their senses.

Little things in my past that I really thought were over and done with were still elements of the puzzle that weren't pieced together, and so she helped me do that.

Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women's movement of the late 1960s and '70s.

To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.

I always wrote about things that were important to me. I think our past success showed that it was also important for a lot of others.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

Liberals in Congress have spent the past three decades pandering to environmental extremists. The policies they have put in place are in large part responsible for the energy crunch we are seeing today. We have not built a refinery in this country for 30 years.

I am not nostalgic for the past.

People who live in the past generally are afraid to compete in the present. I've got my faults, but living in the past is not one of them. There's no future in it.

It's a wonderful feeling to be a bridge to the past and to unite generations. The sport of baseball does that, and I am just a part of it.

In Iroquois society, leaders are encouraged to remember seven generations in the past and consider seven generations in the future when making decisions that affect the people.

Unlike some, I don't claim to hold the mystic key to the future. But judging from past events, it seems to me that those who want to prophesy the imminent end of America's unique global role have a harder case to make than those who think we will limp on for a while, making a mess of things as usual.

But it's funny that now I'm in such a happy situation, I look more objectively at my own past and see what others have seen for a long time and I'm just so glad I've been able to get to this point.

I get photographers hiding in my bushes. We're way past autographs. We're into being stalked and followed.

The lessons of the past should steer us towards ensuring lasting legacies for generations yet to be born.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.

If the house is to be set in order, one cannot begin with the present; he must begin with the past.

Man's inhumanity to man is as old as humanity itself. Some people just do evil things. Most do not. A billion people have seen 'Batman' movies over the past 20 years, and they have been entertained and inspired. One man saw it as a sick entry point for mass murder. The one is tragic. The billion are not. I choose to write for the billion.

I've just finished my 20th book this past year and I'm working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I'll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I'm an artist too.

I wouldn't compare myself to any past Idol contestant, because I don't feel like I am like any of them. Maybe stories are cool but my story is different from most people's story. I don't like to compare myself to other people, I like to just be me.

I am convinced that our movement will be more demoralized and weakened by blind and uncritical admiration than by frank admission of past mistakes.

In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.

Most creative work is a process of people passing ideas and inspirations from the past into the future and adding their own creativity along the way.

My entire life has been an attempt to get back to the kind of feelings you have on a field. The sense of brotherhood, the esprit de corps, the focus - there being no past or future, just the ball. As trite as it sounds, I was happiest playing ball.