Quotes About Past

Assassination creates an instant hero of its target. Any past sins are not just forgiven but utterly forgotten.

History is simply the stories we inherit.

Back then I'd told her, over and over, not to judge people by the way they looked. Or where they lived. Or by their horse or their buggy or their barn. But those days when I held such influence were long gone.

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.

In times of war, as everyone knows, who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable ... in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

The value of the word contextualization is that it suggests the placing of the gospel in the total context of a culture at a particular moment, a moment that is shaped by the past and looks to the future.

Love has no power to look forward — the delicious consciousness of the present, a faint but delightful shadow of the past, form its eternity.

The past was once the future, and it wrought In the high presence of on-looking thought ; All that we have, was by its efforts brought.

The memories were safe, sealed forever in amber.

The past was ruins, but the present was still in play. They would have to tie him down to keep him from going to Ember's Tomb.

Fillory and the Chatwins and the fatal longings they represented had been her dark side and she'd tried to pretend they didn't exist. She'd wanted to have one side only, like a Möbius strip. A Möbius person. But that was a mistake. She was starting to suspect that facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future.

The Futurists?.... Well, of course, they are already past.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them.

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

Every act of memory is an act of forgetting. The tree of memory set its roots in blood. To secure an ideal, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness. To study the self is to forget the self. In forgetting lies the liquefaction of time. The Furies bloat the present with the undigested past. "Memory and oblivion, we call that imagination." We dream in order to forget.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

I like to read my diary occasionally to remind myself what a miserable, alienated old sod I used to be.

The past is a stronger influence in the South. But I think everywhere you have this sense that the world changes faster than you can accommodate yourself to. Looking back and seeing how you got where you are is a useful way to combat disorientation.

In my work as a historian and in my relationships as a friend, teacher, wife, and mother, I have come to think that the most useful way to understand the past and make it work for you is to look at the trade-offs and contradictions that, however deeply buried, can be uncovered in every memory, good or bad.

I think to regret is useless in life. It belongs to the past.

With Tory privatisations in the past we've seen how service users can end up losing out and getting a raw deal.

At drama school I learned the Stanislavski technique, which uses sentimental memories and bits of your past to put real emotion into the scene.

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.