Past Quotes

Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own fortune, and he inherits his own past.

Francis Herbert Hedge

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

Ken Burns

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found - in himself.

Erich Fromm

There is never finality in the display terminal's screen, but an irresponsible whimsicality, as words, sentences, and paragraphs are negated at the touch of a key. The significance of the past, as expressed in the manuscript by a deleted word or an inserted correction, is annulled in idle gusts of electronic massacre.

Alexander Cockburn

A great source of calamity lies in regret and anticipation; therefore a person is wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or future.

Oliver Goldsmith

The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich.

James Loeb

A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.

Fawn M. Brodie

Water is essential for all dimensions of life. Over the past few decades, use of water has increased, and in many places water availability is falling to crisis levels. More than eighty countries, with forty percent of the worldís population, are already facing water shortages, while by year 2020 the worldís population will double. The costs of water infrastructure have risen dramatically. The quality of water in rivers and underground has deteriorated, due to pollution by waste and contaminants from cities, industry and agriculture. Ecosystems are being destroyed, sometimes permanently. Over one billion people lack safe water, and three billion lack sanitation; eighty per cent of infectious diseases are waterborne, killing millions of children each year.

World Bank Institue

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

Henry A. Kissinger

To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.

Charles Horton Cooley

Our politics are our deepest form of expression: they mirror our past experiences and reflect our dreams and aspirations for the future.

Paul Wellstone

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden. provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.

Robert Hughes

Let us not look back to the past with anger, nor towards the future with fear, but look around with awareness

James Thurber

Life is a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter

Charles Lindbergh

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.

Brooks Atkinson
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