- Geriatric
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- Nov 07, 2020
Past Quotes
Looking back to understand what comes next.
This collection of past quotes includes a mid-20th-century physicist's assessment of the atomic-age power balance between Europe and the Anglo-Saxon powers, alongside a separate scientific note on how measurement affects what can be known about earlier moments. Both sit alongside a simpler idea: building your future apart from your past. Related themes appear in our Truth quotes.
- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Dispassionate
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- Nov 07, 2020
If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.
- Different
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- Nov 07, 2020
I knew that alpaca wool, with its cashmere-soft weave, had been transformed into cuddly knick-knacks ranging from pillows to teddy bears. But through selective breeding over the past 6,000 years, alpacas have so diverged from their llama cousins as to become quite different animals.
- Bid
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- Nov 07, 2020
We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.
- Dad
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- Nov 07, 2020
I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.
- Education
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- Nov 07, 2020
Already we're seeing graduates of U.S. higher education going back to their home countries and contributing to societies there, where in the past they would have stayed in the U.S. and built new companies here. We have to have immigration reform that allows talented foreigners to become Americans.
- Nation
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- Nov 07, 2020
A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.
- Nobody
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- Nov 07, 2020
First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.
- Future
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- Nov 07, 2020
What part of 9/11 is big? If the future continues to reinterpret the past, it could be argued that 9/11 provides irrefutable proof that unless there is some other way that we learn to deal with our technology or deal with our brothers and sisters, it is goodbye as a species. That genie does not leave that bottle.
- Music
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- Nov 07, 2020
I don't generally listen to music while working, but sometimes music can help me get past minor writer's block.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
In my research, what I found most interesting was how common and ordinary magic was to people in the past.
- Magic
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- Nov 07, 2020
In the past, people generally believed they could acquire magic in two ways: through learning the craft, either from another practitioner or from books; or through obtaining magic from a powerful being-think Faust or the classic, demonized witch, both of whom get their mojo from Satan.
- Positive
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think we have to be positive and think about what we can do now because the past is the past - we cannot change it.
- Most
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- Nov 07, 2020
I've been lucky enough to have flown some very interesting aircraft in the past, but SpaceShipTwo is far and away the most exciting of them all.
- Office
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- Nov 07, 2020
The Congressional Budget Office tells us that Medicare spending has increased fivefold in the past 42 years, dramatically more than all other categories of federal spending.
- Globalization
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- Nov 07, 2020