"History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible."
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Past quotes
Past
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Past quotes (page 41 of 526)
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"The past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There's only one moment for you to live, and that is the present moment"
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"We recall our terrible past so that we can deal with it, to forgive where forgiveness is necessary, without forgetting; to ensure that never again will such inhumanity tear us apart; and to move ourselves to eradicate a legacy that lurks dangerously as a threat to our democracy."
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"Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils, but present evils triumph over it."
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"When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life."
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"You wouldn't know it, from some of the things I've said over the years, but I like people. I do. I like people, but I like them in short bursts. I don't like people for extended periods of time. I'm all right with them for a little while, but once you get up past around... a minute, minute and a half, I gotta get the fuck out of there."
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"I desire no future that will break the ties of the past."
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"Although I believe in reincarnation, as many people do that live in the East, I do not remember my past lives clearly; I only wish I did."
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"As fear is a close companion to falsehood, so truth follows fearlessness."
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"No doubt you are right... there would be far less suffering amongst mankind if men... did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity."
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"Immigration policy should be generous; it should be fair; it should be flexible. With such a policy we can turn to the world, and to our own past, with clean hands and a clear conscience."
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"The popular and scientific views of "race" no longer coincide. The word "race," as applied scientifically to human groupings, has lost any sharpness of meaning. To-day it is hardly definable in scientific terms, except as an abstract concept which may, under certain conditions, very different from those now prevalent, have been realized approximately in the past and might, under certain other but equally different conditions, be realized in the distant future."
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"To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all."
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"The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history."
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"Human beings look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then we are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well, and when they were part of his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing--rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other."
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"The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims up on them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure."
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"The past cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence."
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"It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory, but when you succeed, you start to realize that you’re capable of far more than you imagined. You live in this vast body called the Universe, which contains all the solutions and all the problems. Visit your soul; don’t visit your past. The Universe goes through many mutations and carries the past with it. We call each of those mutations a ‘life,’ but just as the cells in your body change and yet you remain the same, so time does not pass, it merely changes."
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"The decisions of our past are the architects of our present."
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"It must be around forty, when you're "over the hill." I don't even know what that means and why it's a bad thing. When I go hiking and I get over the hill, that means I'm past the hard part and there's a snack in my future. That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned."
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