Past quotes
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"The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted."
"Everything I got comes from Elijah Mohammed. He taught me who I was, he made me proud, he made me fearless, he made me love my own, I’ve turned down millions to keep from selling out my people, the beautiful name Mohammed Ali. And white people cannot destroy me like they have other big ministers of his in the past by telling us oh, you speak good, you should be the leader.White people make me thinkin' that I'm smart, and as soon as I leave Elijah you can get me. But as long as I stay with the Honorable Elijah Mohammed I'm safe."
"White people cannot destroy me like they have other big ministers of Elijah Mohammed in the past by telling us oh, you speak good, you should be the leader."
"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."
"Past experience told me he could smell my fear; it also told me that the anger accompanying it would pretty much cover the scent. It's good to know how to compensate for your own weaknesses."
"There was no warning before the outbreaks began. One day, things were normal; the next, people who were supposedly dead were getting up and attacking anything that came into range. This was upsetting for everyone involved, except for the infected, who were past being upset about that sort of thing."
"Doing reality TV is hard. You get lost. You are shooting three months before anybody sees it. So you are past [the emotions]. Then when it airs and the public sees it, they react and it drags you back. It feels you have grown, but then you suddenly feel like you haven't moved at all."
". . . What role does historiography play in the way a society and culture "remembers" past events? Does the historian have a moral or civic responsibility to this project of memory that ought to influence the way he or she engages in historical practice? Should moral concerns influence the historian's choice of subject matter, of issues to discuss, of evidence to use?"
"Love is the only passion which suffers neither past nor future."
"You may have noticed over the years that the UN became a bit more media-friendly, a bit more open to the media than in the past."
"The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius."
"Many of us marvel at the icy insensitivity with which women snuff out their armours. But if they did not blot out the past in this manner, life for them would lose all dignity and they could never resist the fatal familiarities to which they once submitted."
"To-day Massachusetts; and the whole of the American republic, from the border of Maine to the Pacific slopes, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, stand upon the immutable and everlasting principles of equal and exact justice. The days of unrequited labor are numbered with the past. Fugitive slave laws are only remembered as relics of that barbarism which John Wesley pronounced "the sum of all villainies," and whose knowledge of its blighting effects was matured by his travels in Georgia and the Carolinas."
"I think the first word of caution is; It's not the kind of market where you need to jump in immediately on these downs. We've trained investors so much over the past decade and a half: Buy the dip, buy the dip."
"When age chills the blood, when our pleasures are past - For years fleet away with the wings of the dove - The dearest remembrance will still be the last, Our sweetest memorial the first kiss of love."
"Yet I did love thee to the last, As ferverently as thou, Who didst not change through all the past, And canst not alter now."
"The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?"
"We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are."
"Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both past and present."
"We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed."
