What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
One’s past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?
You read the past in some old faces.
You can read the whole future of mankind in the past.
When the mind once allows a doubt to gain entrance, the value of deeds performed grow less, their character changes, we forget the past and dread the future.
What’s past is prologue.
What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.
