The Past Quotes

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.

Modern science says: 'The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.' From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

Americans look foward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors.

There is no past that we can bring back to us by the longing for it.

The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.

[Turkish women] had lived free of the veil for 5,000 years, and had been covered only in the last 600 years.

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Society is a partnership not only by those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us

If time travel were possible, you still wouldn't be able to change the past - it's already happened!

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

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

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

The past is the present and the future too.

The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.

The Middle East is undoubtedly in for a rocky time. In Palestine we have a situation which is badly fouled up by the past mistakes of many people, including ourselves. These probably cannot be settled without great unpleasantness, including violence.

The CIA is inhabited by ghosts.

If we were able to see people in other countries and learn about our differences, why would there be any misunderstandings? War would be a thing of the past.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

I think we all agree, the past is over.

A tree falls the way it leans.