Past Quotes

'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.

~ Kip Thorne

Don't time travel into the past, roaming through the nuances as if they can change. Don't bookmark pages you've already read.

~ James Altucher

When I had money in the past, I would always travel rather than spend it on big apartments or cars. And I still feel exactly the same way.

~ Robin Wright

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.

~ Will Self

As human beings, we all have reasons for our behavior. There may be people who have certain physiological issues that dictate why they make certain choices. On the whole, though, I think we're dictated by our structure, our past, our environment, our culture. So once you understand the patterns that shape a person, how can you not find sympathy?

~ Forest Whitaker

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

~ Queen Elizabeth Ii

I belong to a nation which over the past centuries has experienced many hardships and reverses. The world reacted with silence or with mere sympathy when Polish frontiers were crossed by invading armies and the sovereign state had to succumb to brutal force.

~ Lech Walesa

There was a time, in the not so distant past, that if you didn't have what you needed on Thanksgiving, you were pretty much going to have to wait until Friday. Not anymore!

~ Monica Johnson

Successful people maintain a positive focus in life no matter what is going on around them. They stay focused on their past successes rather than their past failures, and on the next action steps they need to take to get them closer to the fulfillment of their goals rather than all the other distractions that life presents to them.

~ Jack Canfield

I believe everything negative that happens in your life is for a positive reason. If your heart breaks, you know that you are a human being and it happens. But you can't mope over it. There's only one life. You better get on ahead and fast. Fast enough not to let your past ever catch up with you.

~ Bipasha Basu

To transcend limitations and form positive new patterns of life based on who you know you can be rather than who you were yesterday, you must give up the modes of thinking, feeling and behaving that only keep you chained to your past.

~ Debbie Ford

If I just do everything the opposite of what my dad did, I think that will make things pretty easy. I can joke about it now because I'm past that stage where it used to hurt. By having a kid, it's gone. I could take all that negative energy that I had and put it in a positive way.

~ Derrick Rose

Now is the time for the U.S. and the nations of Western Europe who engaged in the slave trade throughout this hemisphere to come forward in a positive way to assist in undoing the harm that was caused by their past colonial policies in the hemisphere.

~ Charles B. Rangel

I think people are so immersed in the anti-Scientology mindset by consuming tabloid media and stories about space aliens. It's baffling. When I say I want to see a more positive side of the church, all I'm saying is I want to get past these headlines that talk about aliens and Tom Cruise jumping on a sofa.

~ Louis Theroux

I'm not here to discuss the past... I'm here to be positive.

~ Mark Mcgwire

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.

~ Kurt Sutter

Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.

~ George Packer

In the past, I had a knee-jerk approach to work, and it showed on screen. I was doing movies for the wrong reasons - trying to juggle dates, do too many guest appearances, take up projects under pressure or for emotional reasons.

~ Salman Khan

I think you really have to remember what you loved about making music in the first place. Ultimately, people can be like, 'We've seen this dude in many movies,' but if they hear a song and they're feeling it, they can look past all the personal things and not hold it against you that you're also an actor.

~ Common

But this Veterans Day, I believe we should do more than sing the praises of the bravery and patriotism that our veterans have embodied in the past. We should take this opportunity to re-evaluate how we are treating our veterans in the present.

~ Nick Lampson

Our nuclear scientists and engineers have done a splendid job, and naturally, the entire nation has risen to salute their professional excellence, discipline, and patriotism. They have had the benefit of having been led in the past by great men like Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai.

~ Atal Bihari Vajpayee

The values, the programs, the formula, the determination, and the patriotism responsible for America's past success are still here to be tapped.

~ Michael Mandelbaum

I have in the past overly trusted people and was, in turn, let down by some. Since then, I have learned the difference between putting faith into people and blindly trusting them.

~ Do Won Chang

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.

~ Clara Barton

Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists - they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.

~ Pope Francis

The left puts a lot of faith in a lot of people in the past that were dismal failures that they think are the greatest people who ever lived.

~ Rush Limbaugh

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

~ H. L. Mencken

The faith religious believers have in God is small compared to the faith people put in politicians, knowing how many times they have been disappointed in the past but still insisting that this time it will be different.

~ Jonathan Sacks

The future of Conservatism lies in our beliefs and values, not by throwing them away. We need to shed associations that bind us to past failures, but hold faith with those things that make us Conservatives.

~ Iain Duncan Smith

As an architect, you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.

~ Norman Foster

Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world - which, like it or not, is modern reality.

~ Camille Paglia

I have the same sense of discovery and exhilaration from objects of design and everyday use - I am inspired by the buildings in my city, by park greenery and dazzling store windows, by the jaunty strollers and umbrellas and billboards I walk past. Just strolling our streets, we encounter creativity every single day.

~ Agnes Gund

I could open a thousand Excel documents and still never think to scroll past a wall of empty rows to see if, hidden beneath them, there is a tab I need to click. Just doesn't occur to me. Because, design.

~ Jeffrey Zeldman

Writing and singing does give me some kind of release from the demons of my past, it is a therapy of sorts, but to be honest, my marriage played a more important role in the acceptance of myself than performance has ever done.

~ Michelle Shocked

Racial profiling punishes innocent individuals for the past actions of those who look and sound like them. It misdirects crucial resources and undercuts the trust needed between law enforcement and the communities they serve. It has no place in our national discourse, and no place in our nation's police departments.

~ Benjamin Todd Jealous

To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust.

~ John F. Kennedy

Young men, trust God, and make the future bright with blessing. Old men, trust God, and magnify him for all the mercies of the past.

~ Charles Spurgeon

People don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.

~ Daniel Pauly

Denial exists because human infants, though equipped with trust-o-meters, are built to trust, blindly and absolutely, any older person who wanders past.

~ Martha Beck

With everything that you can imagine at our fingertips, many of the social interactions that help tie people together in a community have faded away. Are communities traditionally built on relationships, trust and familiarity a thing of the past?

~ Dean Ornish