4,591 Quotes About Past

What you're doing now, or have done in the past, need not determine what you can do next and in the future.

no diplomatic intervention will ever be made by any government that I lead in support of any individual terrorist's life. We have only indicated in the past, and will maintain a policy in the future, of intervening diplomatically in support of Australian nationals who face capital sentences abroad.

There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future.

The only thing that interests me is history - reviewing the past and making something out of it.

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.

To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually [essentially?] happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).

This [2016] election better be about the future, not the past. It better be about the issues our nation and the world is facing today, not simply the issues we once faced.

The assumption behind any theology that I've ever been familiar with is that there is a profound beauty in being, simply in itself. Poetry, at least traditionally, has been an educing of the beauty of language, the beauty of experience, the beauty of the working of the mind, and so on. The pastor does, indeed, appreciate it.

Ask people who are close to the natural world: farmers, people who work the land or in some way use the land for their livelihoods. They will tell you what they are seeing isn't so good. They will tell you the changes they have seen in the past twenty years are remarkable in one way or another and unlike anything they had seen before that.