Past Quotes

Even God cannot change the past.

Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future.

I cannot take back one word or action; the past does not change for anyone.

Over the past few years, many of us have increasingly begun to question the direction and meaning of our society as it has developed over the past several centuries.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

Despite the increase in world attention toward Sudan in the past months, the genocide in Darfur has continued without any serious attempt by the Sudanese government to do what governments primarily exist to do, protect their citizens.

The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.

Creation is not taking place now, so far as can be observed. Therefore, it was accomplished sometime in the past, if at all, and thus is inaccessible to the scientific method.

I come from a very working-class background, so my family would have been downstairs in the past, as opposed to upstairs. People are often quite surprised to hear that, that I'm not actually posh.

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don't get past the third paragraph you've wasted your energy and valuable ink.

What lingers from the parent's individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.

The coolest thing I've gotten to do in the past few years is guest star on Sesame Street.

I do sometimes strongly hope that in a past life, my most recent life before this, I was absolutely horrible, evil, hideous. Because otherwise - well, hell, to even things up next time around, I'm going to have to pay for this one, am I not?

It's an unfortunate situation. After such a great play I felt like I got hit late, no flag, broke my hand. That's it. That's pretty much been the story for the past three weeks, and obviously at some point something catastrophic was going to happen, and I broke my hand.

Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose.

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.

Don't trust anyone who has been in school for the past 24 consecutive years.

Goth culture, as mired in the past as it is, even it goes through changes, so Goth when I was growing up is not what it is now. When I think of Goth culture as it is at the moment I think of mall culture.

In the past, when I shot films about fishermen and hunters, I always had to admire their ability to perceive time in its entirety. The present was always temporary.

The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.

In the past, two colleagues died each season. It was generally accepted this could happen.

Ah, beware of snobbery; it is the unwelcome recognition of one's own past failings.

We know the past and its great events, the present in its multitudinous complications, chiefly through faith in the testimony of others.

Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.

A fool too late bewares when all the peril is past.