Past Quotes
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There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.
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Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us.
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We know the past and its great events, the present in its multitudinous complications, chiefly through faith in the testimony of others.
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I came to New York late; I was already past 30.
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People shouldn't dwell on the past. It's enough to try your best in all that you're doing now.
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One of my favorite feelings is the sense I get from pouring over parts of my past before lighting them up and leaving it all behind me to start over again.
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One of the questions I face when working on a book about a historical event is whether I should visit the actual place that I'm writing about. No matter how scrupulously maintained a historic house or battlefield may be, it is nothing like it was in the long-ago past.
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What would I put in a museum? Probably a museum! That's an amusing relic of our past.
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It's easy to look into the future and worry about the past.
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What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided - they were one and the same thing.
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It was an old, old, old, old lady, And a boy who was half-past three; And the way they played together Was beautiful to see.
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I still believe many poets begin in fear and hope: fear that the poetic past will turn out to be a monologue rather than a conversation. And hope that their voice can be heard as that past turns into a future.
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I've always had to train harder than others to get the oxygen to my muscles because of my lung capacity. I have to push myself past the point of being comfortable.
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Luckily, my wife is amazing. She's one of the few people in my life I'm completely honest with. I've told her everything about my past. She knows me inside and out. There's no secrets at all.
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When I produce a movie - and I've produced a number of movies, unlike Arnold - yes, I'm frustrated when the union says you can't do this, you can't work past that hour, you've got to break for lunch. But ultimately, they're right. What they do is for everyone's benefit.
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The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.
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So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, there's never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.
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Biology has tended to be an observational science, and deriving things from first principles has not been possible in the past, but I hate to predict the future on that.
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Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past.
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I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.
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One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress.
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The supreme need of the world is peace and good will among men. It must be peace founded upon justice and fairness, the righting of past wrong, and the securing of the future as far as possible against the evils of the past.
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I don't connect much with the present. I have more of an affinity for what came in the past.
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Getting past my past... was a process, a very serious process indeed.
