Quotes on Past

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues of the past and thereby contribute to understanding the issues and conditions of the present and future.

I've been bothered about time generally and our tripartite division of time into past, present, and future. I think I know what the past is, and I think I know what future is, but I'm really not comfortable with the notion of present.

So long as you create laws that define women as victims, as creatures that demand protection, that need bodyguards, you are going to perpetuate the very worst of our sexist past.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I can't go back to yesterday - because I was a different person then.

He was what I often think is a dangerous thing for a statesman to be - a student of history; and like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

You do indeed have a past, but not now! And, yes, you have a future, but not now! You can consume your now with thoughts of 'then' and 'maybe,' but that will keep you from the inner peace you could experience.

I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done.

In the past, there was active discrimination against women in science. That has now gone, and although there are residual effects, these are not enough to account for the small numbers of women, particularly in mathematics and physics.

Stay true to your vision/dream. There's something to be said for just staying at what you are trying to achieve well past the point everyone else gives up.

No system of religion should go in partnership with barbarism. Neither should any Christian feel it his duty to defend the savagery of the past.

With thoughts of the past and concerns about the future, we rob ourselves of a full experience of the present.

A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.

It's kind of a subversive act to tell a story of a woman past a certain age, to develop a four-hour movie based on a marriage and a story of two people past middle age.

Large organizations don't worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn't take a crisis to set a company on a new path.

In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first... The first object of any good system must be that of developing first class men.