Jean Rostand Quotes

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.

I think some people are just very passionate that things remain the way they were when they were kids.

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

In charting our course to the future, we are mindful of our path from the past.

We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.

What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.

The past has to inform the present.

When men are easy in their circumstances, they are naturally enemies to innovations.

True conservatives fear anything that is at odds with the status quo, even to the extent of being unable to recognise when the status quo represents injustice. And reactionary conservatives actually want to tear down the gains of the past.

The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact a return to the idealized past.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

What was good enough for my father is good enough for me" is a treasured English axiom which, if strictly carried out, would have kept us to wooden ploughs and water clocks. In these days we need to be inoculated with some of the nervous energy of the Americans.

We are living in the jet-age, but we are governed by an Edwardian establishment mentality.

I think it's easy to hold on to this romantic hope that communities such as Niaqornat won't change, because we're in this world where progress is unstoppable, and they're a link to some idealised past.

The idea that somehow the way forward is to abandon the past, to me, is preposterous and both undesirable and unrealistic.