Past Quotes
In 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' protagonist Winston Smith works at a propaganda department for the state called the 'Ministry of Truth,' where inconvenient news can be discarded down a 'memory hole.' Orwell was fixated on the idea that under certain governments, the past can be altered or documents rewritten.
Elizabeth Flock
Over the past five years, I have often recalled that the United Nations' Charter begins with the words: 'We the peoples.' What is not always recognized is that 'we the peoples' are made up of individuals whose claims to the most fundamental rights have too often been sacrificed in the supposed interests of the state or the nation.
Kofi Annan
Today, public understanding of our past and our system of government is pitifully low.
Eric Liu
When I first started playing the banjo and miraculously fell into a record deal in Nashville, TN, there was a period when I didn't go to China. It hurt. Like a pain in my gut... that pain you feel when you know it's time to connect with your parents or your God or your child or your past or your future... and you don't do it.
Abigail Washburn
Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself.
Pico Iyer
If coming events are said to cast their shadows before, past events cannot fall to leave their impress behind them.
H. P. Blavatsky
The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.
Emile Zola
Don't allow your past or present condition to control you. It's just a process that you're going through to get you to the next level.
T. D. Jakes
The nasty thing about the availability bias is that it insidiously distorts our view of the world by distorting our perception of past events and our environment.
Leonard Mlodinow
That past is still within our living memory, a time when neighbour helped neighbour, sharing what little they had out of necessity, as well as decency.
Mary McAleese
The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.
Hannah Arendt
The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.
Flannery O'Connor
Knowledge of the past and an optimistic view of the present give you great opportunities.
Buzz Aldrin
The future's come and gone; it's a thing of the past. That once impossibly exotic expression 'the year 2000,' for so long evocative of silver suits and robots in pinnies, now feels antiquated.
Peter Baynham
Sometimes you need other people to embody situations so that you can talk about things that for you are important. And I think that being able to hope for the future is what builds in us the strength to just get rid of things that, in the past, can hurt.
Ingrid Betancourt
Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
Djuna Barnes
I don't think France is a racist country, I really don't, but we do still have many problems with our immigrant past, and there's a shame that goes with that, that works both ways, in the host and in the post-immigrant generation.
Vincent Cassel
I must admit that i am fascinated by the glories of ancient India. But when will the purveyors of Indian culture realise that not everything about our past was glorious?
Ashwin Sanghi
You do indeed have a past, but not now! And, yes, you have a future, but not now! You can consume your now with thoughts of 'then' and 'maybe,' but that will keep you from the inner peace you could experience.
Wayne Dyer
I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.
James Rollins
What it talks about is stuff that I've gone through, like, in the past year, which is, you know, a lot, and some of it's good, and some of it's bad, and a lot of it's, like, a big learning experience. And I got to write a lot about that with people that I've worked with before, so I felt completely comfortable.
Hilary Duff
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
Wallace Stegner
