Past Quotes

Maybe we've been brainwashed by 130 years of Yankee history, but Southern identity now has more to do with food, accents, manners, music than the Confederate past. It's something that's open to both races, a variety of ethnic groups and people who move here.

~ John Shelton Reed

I don't try to match wine with food, I just drink what I like. And I think a lot of people are going towards that now, which never used to be in the past.

~ Mario Lemieux

I love food. I'm a huge food addict. I think in my past life I was a pig or something like that, but I love eating; I never stop eating.

~ Justin Lee

And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

~ James Madison

In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu sadhu, the pilgrims of Compostela walking past their sins, the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora, the haj.

~ Robyn Davidson

Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present.

~ Bil Keane

People spend too much time finding other people to blame, too much energy finding excuses for not being what they are capable of being, and not enough energy putting themselves on the line, growing out of the past, and getting on with their lives.

~ J. Michael Straczynski

The past always looks better than it was. It's only pleasant because it isn't here.

~ Finley Peter Dunne

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

~ Alice Munro

The Joker is my favorite villain of all time: You don't know his past you just know what his plans are.

~ The Weeknd

The past cannot be cured.

~ Elizabeth I

Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.

~ Marina Abramović

Yet consider now, whether women are not quite past sense and reason, when they want to rule over men.

~ John Calvin

Right actions in the future are the best apologies for bad actions in the past.

~ Tryon Edwards

You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don't get past the third paragraph you've wasted your energy and valuable ink.

~ Carl Hiaasen

The best prophet of the future is the past.

~ Lord Byron

You're going to struggle. You're going to do well. You can't really let the past or the day before - whether you had a good day or bad day - dictate the day you have that certain day.

~ Andrew Benintendi

In the past the man has been first in the future the system must be first... The first object of any good system must be that of developing first class men.

~ Frederick W. Taylor

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

~ René Descartes

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

~ Wendell Berry

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

~ Dan Quayle

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

~ George Santayana

My countrymen: we have reached a turning point in our history. The choice is yours. Shall we venture into this brave new world, bright with possibilities, or retreat to the safety of our familiar but sterile past? I am for crossing the frontier.

~ Ferdinand Marcos

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

~ Abraham Lincoln

What happens when good people are put into an evil place? Do they triumph or does the situation dominate their past history and morality?

~ Philip Zimbardo

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

~ Thomas Sowell

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

~ James Mattis

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

~ Jessamyn West

What has history said of eminence without honor, wealth without wisdom, power and possessions without principle? The answer is reiterated in the overthrow of the mightiest empires of ancient times. Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome! The four successive, universal powers of the past. What and where are they?

~ Orson F. Whitney

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.

~ Jean Piaget

As nations we should also commit afresh to righting past wrongs. In Australia we began this recently with the first Australians - the oldest continuing culture in human history. On behalf of the Australian Parliament, this year I offered an apology to indigenous Australians for the wrongs they had suffered in the past.

~ Kevin Rudd

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

~ John F. Kennedy

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

~ Warren Buffett

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

~ George Eliot

We are not merely passive pawns of historical forces nor are we victims of the past. We can shape and direct history.

~ Daisaku Ikeda

What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.

~ Victor Hugo

The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.

~ Dalai Lama

I think my attitudes about the past are very traditional. You can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.

~ Frank Gehry

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.

~ Leopold Von Ranke

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

~ A. Whitney Brown