Past Quotes

I think that over the last few decades, we have seen better economic outcomes than in the past.

To be able to look back upon one's past life with satisfaction is to live twice.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

This enemy of peace in the world today is unlike any we have seen in the past, and our military is learning from, and building on, previous successes while carrying peace and freedom into the future.

With two thousand years of Christianity behind him... a man can't see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head.

In the past, people worked together only when some great disaster threatened.

Even though there's no forum for me on the radio for the kind of music I sing anymore, I am still excited about having a career where I can sing the best music in the world, and people will come and hear me because of the hit records I've had in the past.

Bobby and I have been to various reunions of Our Gang. We've been to like three or four reunions over the past 15 years or so. We were at one in Palm Springs, California.

That's history. I say history because it happened in the past.

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

One of the tragedies of modern times is that people have come to believe that something said by someone in the past, perhaps for illustrative or provocation purposes, actually represents that person's beliefs at the time.

I've often said in the past that I thought MTV was sort of evil incarnate and signified the beginning of the end. And I don't know if I'm entirely wrong about that, but they did sign my paychecks a year ago, so I guess I'm part of the problem.

I have memories - but only a fool stores his past in the future.

We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

In the past few years I have begun the process of becoming a new man.

I've got a chart here that shows our debt-to-GDP ratio. And while we did run deficits in the past, we now number our debt in trillions rather than in billions. And I think that represents a long-term danger, especially to the, the American dream.

One can't deny what has happened to us in the past. The secret is to enjoy and be proud of the music we've created and the people with whom we have been linked. It's all a long chain of involvement in the world, and we are proud to be yet another link in this chain.

Never mind a world that can't see past brutality.

We have to look forward and keep filming new films and not get stuck in the past.

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

In the past, human society provided encouragement and opportunity for people to extend support to each other, especially in highly stressful situations.

Such decisions will be far reaching and difficult. But you never lacked courage in the past. Your courage is now needed for the future.

I'm competitive with myself. I always try to push past my own borders.

When I was younger I used to get my best writing done at night, but now it has to be during the day. I usually finish work at half past seven, then go back to the house to open a bottle of wine, have dinner, and then read or watch television.

See, what you're meant to do when you have a mid-life crisis is buy a fast car, aren't you? Well, I've always had fast cars. It's not that. It's the fear that you're past your best. It's the fear that the stuff you've done in the past is your best work.

Americans have a penchant for the future and tend to disregard the past.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively.

It is curious to reflect, for example, upon the remarkable legend of the Philosopher's Stone, one of the oldest and most universal beliefs, the origin of which, however far back we penetrate into the records of the past, we do not probably trace its real source.