Past Quotes - Page 158

Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.

I have a terrible memory because I'm not interested in the past. It's done, it's done.

The choices you've made in the past are the direct cause of all your unhappiness today.

Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)

It is imperative that the past of the pilgrims' progress be intentionally carried forward into the present as we work into our future. Without it we cannot know who we are, why we are here, or where we can go. Without a common past to live out of we become aimless and wandering individuals instead of a pilgrim people.

It is, then, by those shadows of the hoary Past and their fantastic silhouettes on the external screen of every religion and philosophy, that we can, by checking them as we go along, and comparing them, trace out finally the body that produced them.

Fantasy is, at its best, the purest access to storytelling that we have. It universalizes a tale, it evokes wonder and timeless narrative power, it touches upon inner journeys, it illuminates our collective and individual pasts, throws a focus beam on the present day, and presages the dangers and promises of the future.

Getting stressed and struggling to change the outcome of any past event is like arguing with an echo to make it see your point of view.

O my heart! Love God as the chatrik loves the rain drops, Who even when fountains are full and the land green, Is not satisfied as long as it cannot get a drop of rain.

I think that in the past, in the '50s and '60s, after the existentialists and beatniks and hippie movements, the big deal was, Don't sell out. We live in a society that by virtue of the speed we communicate and sell, everything sells. The danger is buying in; that your concern becomes success, rather than fulfillment. They're two different beasts, and my feeling is that you should seek fulfillment. You should not measure your worth in how much you have or how popular you are, but how happy you are with what you do.

I think the future is like anything else that's important. It has to be earned. If we don't earn it, we don't have a future at all. And if we don't earn it, we don't deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that's probably what love is - a way of earning the future.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

You expect to cop a bit wherever you go. In the past there hasn't been any racism or any racist comments that I've seen. I'm expecting a tough time, as we get everywhere we go, but racism hasn't been a problem before.

Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.

Everything we now enjoy has been provided through the kindness of other beings, past or present.

It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.

In the past we entrusted money to the government sector and the government sector simply did not spend the money wisely. And that is why we need reforms, but the government sector is not being reformed.

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.

One should learn from the past, but one should not live in the past. My concern is to look to the future, learn from the past, and deal with the present.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

Any material form, or thought, or feeling, past or present, should be regarded as, 'This is not mine, this is not what I am, this is not my self.'

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.

In the long term the most important question for a company is not what you are but what you are becoming.

I viewed the station as a place, a terrain where I could put a new architecture in place. The station was, of course, an historic monument, but it does not deserve all the respect given it when it is said it is perfect, original and coherent expression of a past that we must revere. Orsay is basically a box.

I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.