"Let the past abolish the past when -- and if -- it can substitute something better."
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Past quotes
Past
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Past quotes (page 114 of 526)
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"We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves."
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"Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so."
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"As I enter on the path of happiness, I scatter the dregs and shreds and clippings of the past behind me. I divest myself of all the crapulous years."
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"Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form: not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living."
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"Come, go with us, speak fair; you may salve so, Not what is dangerous present, but the los Of what is past."
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"Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had Past reason hated"
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"The past is prologue."
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"What's past and what's to come is strew'd with husks And formless ruin of oblivion."
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"They say miracles are past."
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"Doubting things go ill often hurts more Than to be sure they do; for certainties Either are past remedies, or, timely knowing, The remedy then born."
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"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought."
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"Personally, I do not believe that we shall have greater armaments in the future than we have had in the past. On the contrary, I believe there will be a gradual diminution in this respect."
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"History unfolds itself by strange and unpredictable paths. We have little control over the future; and none at all over the past."
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"The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope."
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"We are shaping the world faster than we can change ourselves, and we are applying to the present the habits of the past."
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"In the past we have had a light which flickered, in the present we have a light which flames, and in the future there will be a light which shines over all the land and sea."
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"May it not also be that the cause of civilization itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen? There never has been, I suppose, in all the world, in all the history of war, such an opportunity for youth. The Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders, all fall back into the past."
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"There are two processes which we adopt consciously or unconsciously when we try to prophesy. We can seek a period in the past whose conditions resemble as closely as possible those of our day, and presume that the sequel to that period will, save for some minor alterations, be similar. Secondly, we can survey the general course of development in our immediate past, and endeavor to prolong it into the near future. The first is the method the historian; the second that of the scientist. Only the second is open to us now, and this only in a partial sphere."
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"We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past."
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