Past Quotes

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.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

I'm well past the age where I'm acceptable. You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you're not going to get played on radio and you're not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth.

Conventionally, one looks at history as something of the past. But after Einstein, who knows what is in the past and what is in the present?

It is my belief that it is not the fact that he traveled as much as he did during the past few months as much as what he said and how he said it that hurt him.

Over the past few years, the road to confrontation has shown its consequences: loss of innocent lives, destruction and fear. Most costly, however, was the loss of hope. The most precious gift that you can present to your peoples over the coming weeks is renewed hope born out of tangible progress on the ground.

Again I entered my smithy to work and forge something from the noble material of time past.

I've done Graham Norton's show three times now. He tackles taboos and subject matter that wouldn't make it past the censors in the States.

I must be careful not to get trapped in the past. That's why I tend to forget my songs.

Never revisit the past, that's dangerous. You know, move on.

In the past I've had a bad injury, and then struggled when I've got back because I've been unfit.

Winners must learn to relish change with the same enthusiasm and energy that we have resisted it in the past.

I recall feeling an almost delicious terror when one day I found myself alone in the midst of tall June grasses that grew high as my head. But here the secret working of self consciousness is almost too entangled with the things of the past for me to explain it.

The Congressional Budget Office tells us that Medicare spending has increased fivefold in the past 42 years, dramatically more than all other categories of federal spending.

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

An author who sets about to depict events of the past that have run their course is suspected of wishing to avoid the problems of the present day, of being, in other words, a reactionary.

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.

Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.

After I became a citizen, I felt freer to say what I thought about this country, both negative and positive. I think I had been, consciously and subconsciously, biting my tongue in the past.

I have been wounded like this since about half past eight this morning and I will tell you how it happened.

The reason to split a court is for administrative purposes, and in the past there has been much debate about the liberal decisions of the Ninth Circuit and so forth; and people have wanted to get out of the Ninth Circuit for that reason.

The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.