Famous Quotes & Sayings

David McCullough

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

David McCullough

The past after all is only another name for someone else's present.

David McCullough

Each generation, we peel back biases that have blinded those before us. The more we know about the past enables us to ask richer and more provocative questions about who we are today.

David McCullough

I'm absolutely positive it's in our human nature to want to know about the past. The two most popular movies of all time, while not historically accurate, are about core historic events: Gone With the Wind and Titanic.

David McCullough

You can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past. They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don't know how it's going to come out. They weren't just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can't understand them if you don't understand how they perceived reality.

David McCullough

First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.

David McCullough

Nobody ever lived in the past.

David Mitchell

The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts.

David Mitchell

The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. This mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.

David Mitchell

I’m scared of the future. I’m scared of the past. I’m nervous at the moment.

David Mitchell

Time is the speed at which the past decays.

David Mitchell

Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.

David Lange

After that, whenever I drove past Mangakahia, I would empty my ashtray - and I was a heavy smoker in those days - on the road outside the hall.

Dave Barry

My current computer, in addition to 'DOS,' has 'Windows,' which is another invention of Bill Gates, designed as a security measure to thwart those users who are somehow able to get past DOS.

Dave Barry

Now, once again, we find ourselves facing rising gas prices, and the question is: This time, are we going to learn from the past? Are we finally going to get serious about energy conservation? Of course not! We have the brains of mealworms! So we need to get more oil somehow. As far as I can figure, there's only one practical way to do this. That's right: We need to clone more dinosaurs. We have the technology, as was shown in two blockbuster scientific movies, Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park Returns with Exactly the Same Plot. Once we have the dinosaurs, all we need is an asteroid.

Carl Sagan

If we could travel into the past, it's mind-boggling what would be possible. For one thing, history would become an experimental science, which it certainly isn't today. The possible insights into our own past and nature and origins would be dazzling. For another, we would be facing the deep paradoxes of interfering with the scheme of causality that has led to our own time and ourselves. I have no idea whether it's possible, but it's certainly worth exploring.

Byron Katie

Fear is always the result of an unquestioned past imagined as a future.

Byron Katie

Since the past is unreal and the future is unreal, all your thoughts are about nothing.

Buddy Rice

In the past, people said I wasn't focused and didn't give it the time. That's a bunch of crap. I'm not doing anything different now than I did before.

Cesare Pavese

The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.

Catherine Crowe

What a man has made himself he will be; his state is the result of his past life, and his heaven or hell is in himself.

Catherine Fisher

We are chained hand and foot by protocol, enslaved to a static, empty world where men and women can’t read, where the scientific advances of the ages are the preserve of the rich, where artists and poets are doomed to endless repetitions and sterile reworking of past masterpieces. Nothing is new. New does not exist. Nothing changes, nothing grows, evolves, develops. Time has stopped. Progress is forbidden

Cary Fowler

The coldest growing seasons of the future [will be] hotter than the hottest of the past. Is agriculture adapted to that? I don't know. Can fish play the piano?

Cary Grant

Ah, beware of snobbery; it is the unwelcome recognition of one's own past failings.

Carter G. Woodson

Truth comes to us from the past, then, like gold washed down from the mountains.

Carlton Cuse

It's entirely possible that the notion of what is the past, what is the present and what is the future, could change.

Carlos Santana

Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story.

Camille Paglia

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

Camille Paglia

Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

Camille Paglia

Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world - which, like it or not, is modern reality.

Camille Paglia

Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women's movement of the late 1960s and '70s.

Agnes Repplier

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.