Past Quotes

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.

There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relics of the giants of the past.

There is no point in reliving the past. There is the future to think about.

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.

It’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

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?

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

You read the past in some old faces.