Past quotes
10.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"What's the greatest enemy of Christianity to-day? Frozen meat. In the past only members of the upper classes were thoroughly sceptical, despairing, negative. Why? Among other reasons, because they were the only people who could afford to eat too much meat. Now there's cheap Canterbury lamb and Argentine chilled beef. Even the poor can afford to poison themselves into complete scepticism and despair."
"Procrustes in modern dress, the nuclear scientist will prepare the bed on which mankind must lie; and if mankind doesn’t fit—well, that will be just too bad for mankind. There will have to be some stretching and a bit of amputation—the same sort of stretching and amputations as have been going on ever since applied science really got going into its stride, only this time they will be a good deal more drastic than in the past. These far from painless operations will be directed by highly centralized totalitarian governments."
"Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation. If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is also because they long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing."
"I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas."
"In Cuba the elections for the powers of the State comes from the people, first it comes from meetings of the citizens at the base. In Cuba we call them blocks, the divisions of a city that is the term we use. Several blocks of neighborhoods that live in the same area gather in assemblies that are stipulated by law. In those assemblies the people choose freely among themselves who will represent them. The criteria takes into account the candidates characteristics, including if they are hardworking, If they are good people, if they have a clean past, and money has no bearing on who is nominated."
"Over the past several years, all of us as Canadians, and as members of the North American cultural and economic environment, have been to a greater or lesser extent party to a significant attitudinal change towards our culture."
"Thoughts must come naturally, like wild-flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed, even although aided by the leaf-mould of your past."
"But Valentine, why despair, why always paint the future in such sombre hues?" Maximilien asked. "Because, my friend, I judge it by the past."
"Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities."
"We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities."
"The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past."
"The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present."
"We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery."
"There are people who have benefited from therapy without being confronted with the past at all."
"I do look in the mirror frequently. But I look past the physical and I feel proud of what I see, because I know where my heart is and the struggles I've been through to be able to stand where I'm standing."
"He was jealous of her future, and she of his past."
"We have to be willing to give up all the injustices of the past that did exist - and that do exist right now. When we become interested in liberation, we then become interested in that which transcends time."
"I know of no culture in the world at present or any time in the past that has not been heavily involved with one or more psychoactive substances."
"I run from Horatio Street down just past Battery Park City and back. It's amazing to run and see the Statue of Liberty and the ferries coming in. People think if you're not near Central Park, there's nowhere to go, but there's a whole ecosystem happening down here."
"In the past I've made movies that were pretty universally liked. You can't really hate them. You can discard them, but you can't really hate them."
