- 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
- Alive
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm a pro forma Bernie Sanders donor. In years past, when Michael Harrington was still alive, I was a very active member of Democratic Socialists of America.
- Culture
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- Nov 07, 2020
In the past, a great library was the result of librarians functioning as guardians of culture, tending and caring, selecting and recommending works that maintained and nurtured a cultural heritage.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
My entire life has been an attempt to get back to the kind of feelings you have on a field. The sense of brotherhood, the esprit de corps, the focus - there being no past or future, just the ball. As trite as it sounds, I was happiest playing ball.
- Drained
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- Nov 07, 2020
When confronted with a direct threat to American security, Obama has shown he is willing to act unilaterally - in a targeted, get-in-and-get-out fashion, that avoids, at all costs, the kind of messy ground wars and lengthy occupations that have drained America's treasury and spirit for the past decades.
- Curiosity
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- Nov 07, 2020
In some ways, writing a novel, especially a novel set in the past and about characters who once lived, is about amassing enough details and arranging them properly in order to offer the reader a verisimilitude that satisfies his or her curiosity about the story at hand.
- Doubt
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- Nov 07, 2020
I wouldn't put it past God to arrange a virgin birth if He wanted, but I very much doubt if He would.
- Learning
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- Nov 07, 2020
Increasingly, over the past ten years, I've come to take the view that a cultural perspective is intrinsic to the future of language teaching and learning, especially in the case of English, as it becomes increasingly global.
- Internet
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- Nov 07, 2020
The main effect of the Internet on language has been to increase the expressive richness of language, providing the language with a new set of communicative dimensions that haven't existed in the past.
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
A maverick feels like he has no choice however difficult his choice of expression. In my case, it was going backwards into tonality. It seemed so wrong. The idea that progress is going into the past in a new way is very strange, even though there are precedents.
- Nov 07, 2020
Just because something's been good in the past doesn't mean it will continue to be good.
- Building
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- Nov 07, 2020
Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.
- Development
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- Nov 07, 2020