Chuck Klosterman Quotes

In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.

We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present

When we think about the past, we think, 'It must have been so boring.' It's actually not.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.

I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

Predicting the future is very difficult. As a historian I have trouble trying to predict the past.

We should never look down on those of the past and say they should have known better. What do you think they will be saving about us in the future? They’re going to be saying we should have known better.

There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.

Can we ever understand the past, or do we just endlessly rework it to suit us in the present?

We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.

For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment

Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

My future will not copy my fair past, I wrote that once. And, thinking at my side my ministering life-angel justified the word by his appealing look upcast to the white throne of God.

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.

We are always looking into the future, but we see only the past.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

I naturally believe there will be a future, but I do not waste my time imagining its radiant beauty. ... It seems to me that we ought to think first about the present. Even if the present is desperately dark, I do not wish to leave it. Will tomorrow be free from darkness? We'll talk about that tomorrow.

Sometimes, I think, our impulses come not from the past, but from the future.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

Leaving high school. It's sad and you're going to miss all your friends. You're going to miss your life and you've been doing that for the past four years, and it's comfortable. But now, there's something possibly bigger on the horizon, just new and fresh and exciting. I think we all kind of felt like that.

How hard it is to project oneself into the future. We are always prone to think of the conditions which are with us today as being permanent conditions.

No one ever thinks about what the hell is going to happen 25 years from now.