Past Quotes - Page 269

We recall the joy and excitement of a nation that had found itself, the collective relief that we had stepped out of our restrictive past, and the expectant air of walking into a brighter future.

South Africans must recall the terrible past so that we can deal with it, forgiving where forgiveness is necessary but never forgetting.

We don't have to be victims of our past, that we can let go of our bitterness, and that all of us can achieve greatness.

A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)

All cats can see futures, and see echoes of the past. We can watch the passage of creatures from the infinity of now, from all the worlds like ours, only fractionally different. And we follow them with our eyes, ghost things, and the humans see nothing.

One of the most significant events in our distant past is still perhaps the greatest mystery: the origins of life itself.

Yesterday I visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart. The present is burdened too much with the past.

With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother's recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations?

The biggest challenge is how to get people to wake up and realize this is a one-shot deal. If we fail, we are witting participants in the biggest experiment humans have ever done: moving CO2 levels to twice their value in the past 670.000 years and hoping it turns out okay for generations to come.

No one wants to see a person on TV who's super-ultra-cool. That's Superman, that's a thing of the past. Heroes are now flawed, and have terrible tempers, you know? They're real people.

I think fashion is actually very good training for being in the tech world, because it's all about moving on to the next thing, looking for the next thing, not getting stuck in the past.

I've been a member of some good gyms in the past. I love a good spinning class; I love a good aerobics class.

Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich.

We can see how the role of mobile has changed in past 20 years. It is a perfect example of how one innovation can change an entire era.

Imagination judges the future by the past, but concerns itself with the future more than with the past.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.

Truth: We are the present. We are now. We are the razor's edge of history. The future flies at us and from that dark blur we shape the past. And the past is forever.

The past is dead except for the life you give it

The time is past when Christians in America can take a long spoon and hand the gospel to the black man out the back door.

I like complex characters. I've been very, very lucky to portray, in these past three years, characters that are strong and fragile at the same time. It's those characters that I'm looking for. In the last year and half I played three different religions, and that allowed me to educate myself so much.

Liberal hostility to the traditional family helped to undermine centuries of accumulated wisdom and experience about what was best for children and adults. Far from benefiting only men, marriage confers enormous advantages on women and children as well - a fact that has been thrown into sharp relief by its breakdown over the past forty years.

Reasoning is the pastime of my whole household, and all this reasoning has driven out Reason.

As the great philosopher George Santayana would have said, 'those who cannot remember the past . . . should simply read Jan Van Meter's Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.' Van Meter's greatest hits collection of slogans is the catchiest ever retelling of American history. It's like the greatest minds of Madison Avenue sat down to write a history book. They don't make sound bites like they used to!

I like to think of myself as a reasonable man. But I have buried too many friends in the too-recent past, and I have seen too many lies go unquestioned, and too many questions go unasked. There is a time when even reasonable men must begin to take unreasonable actions. To do anything else is to be less than human.

It is past all controversy that what costs dearest is, and ought to be, most valued.