Quotes About Past

History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.

Conservatism's vulnerability is simply that it has no way to extract power from the evils America owned up to in the '60s - no way to use the sins of the past to coerce Americans into doing what it wants.

You may be embarrassed about the way you looked and the wacky clothes you wore when you were young, but normally, at least it's hidden in a box in the attic.

Knowledge in the Internet Age - networked knowledge - is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it's provisional; it's a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved.

Italy remained attached to conservatism. It had a political class that lived in the past and didn't build the future. The past is our strength, but it risks becoming our ruin if we walk with our heads turned backwards.

I've walked on a lot of battlefields. Most of them are not haunted.

I guess this song isn't about anything necessarily sad, but it makes me sad just because it makes me think about how inaccessible the past is, but it's called 'Boy Child' by Scott Walker.

I've had fantasies in the past of walking across America or some great distance, but it's such a commitment of time that it's stopped me.

I think that my regrets mostly have to do with my relationship with my ex-girlfriend. Every once in a while, you get those flashback memories of conversations you had with your exes, and you just, like, wince when you're walking down the street. Something occurs to you, 'Oh, no, I said that.'

Being scared is really a good thing. It's being scared of being scared that's bad. Being scared of walking through your fear, going to a place of true creativity - that's what an artist is, that's what he does. If you do that, then being inspired by your contemporaries or people from the past is really great.

I believe that one reason I began writing essays - a form without a form, until you make it - was this: you didn't have to borrow from an emotionally and visually upsetting past, as one did in fiction, apparently, to write your story.

I was always a history buff.

I like reading about the past. I'm definitely not a history buff, but I do read a bit of history now and again, and to do that for work is really exciting.

I think the history and the past we have is just an energy we've built up to do what we do now.

Football is such a traditionalist sport. Whatever happened in the past is usually going to continue. But the bullying has no place in any sport. That's the bottom line.

My burden is my past as a TV star. But, you know, pasts cannot be a life sentence.

The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.

I try, in the present, to not exalt the past because I think that's such a way of diminishing the present. And it's hard to live like that.

Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men's nostalgia.

I'm kind of a sucker for the retro-diagnoses.

On Facebook, your past comes into your present when someone from your second grade class suddenly pops up to send you a message, and your future is being manipulated by what Facebook knows to put in front of you next.

Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us.

It's perfectly possible to spotlight Black joy over Black suffering. Setting the story in the past doesn't mean that Black folks do nothing but suffer.

What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided - they were one and the same thing.