Backward Thinking Quotes

… the idiocy of rural life

It's always easier for people to face backward than to face forward.

While you have a future do not live too much in contemplation of your past: unless you are content to walk backward the mirror is a poor guide.

There has always been in history some people who think in the Stone Age.

The cultural influences in our country are like the floo floo bird. I am referring to the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been.

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

If I see an ending, I can work backward.

I never think of what it's going to be like later. I only think in the present tense. The only time I think backwards is when I have to reissue something.

Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.

When you hear a person say, "I hate," adding the name of some race, nation, religion, or social class, you are dealing with a belated mind. That person may dress like a modern, ride in an automobile, listen to the radio, but his or her mind is properly dated about 1000 B.C.

Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.

Only a fool walks into the future backwards.

Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

Human evolution relies on cooperation, which is why identity politics feels so backward.

As a country, we should be moving forward, but instead conservative lawmakers keep dragging us back.

What but education has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbors? And what chains them to their present state of barbarism and wretchedness but a bigoted veneration for the supposed superlative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization?

Can anything good come of a backward way of thinking like judging someone based on skin color? No way.

He's a pre-Copernican obscurantist

I have seen myself backward.

The historian is a prophet looking bzckwards.

Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.

It is not possible to go forward while looking back.

I hate looking backward, but every once in a while it sneaks up on you.

I can no longer face life, so I've decided to go through the rest of it backwards.

They spend their time looking forward to the past.