Understanding Past Quotes

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born is to be condemned to live as a child.

People must know the past to understand the present, and to face the future.

Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future.

The value of history. ..is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

You can only understand the present age when it is past.

History informs where we are and how we got here.

Like I'm always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can't do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.

An accurate knowledge of the past of a country is necessary for everyone who would understand its present, and who desires to judge of its future.

You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

In order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been.

It is in our nature to travel into our past, hoping thereby to illuminate the darkness that bedevils the present.

I do believe the most important thing I can do now is to help young people understand the past and prepare for the future.

To find out what we presently are and where we are going, we must know what we have been and what others have done; and this, because the humanities are at once the creation and the interpreters of the past, is the great purpose of humanistic scholarship.

If you don't know where you come from, it's difficult to determine where you are.- It's even more difficult to plan where you are going.

I think my attitudes about the past are very traditional. You can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.

The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.