- Great
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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
- Education
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- Nov 07, 2020
Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill.
- Change
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- Nov 07, 2020
We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.
- Moment
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- Nov 07, 2020
Because God gave you your makeup and superintended every moment of your past, including all the hardship, pain, and struggles, He wants to use your words in a unique manner. No one else can speak through your vocal cords, and, equally important, no one else has your story.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
I've had fantasies in the past of walking across America or some great distance, but it's such a commitment of time that it's stopped me.
- Direct Contact
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- Nov 07, 2020
The belief may be too often mistaken, but the illusion of coming into direct contact with the past is intoxicating and persuasive, and can result in an interpretation that carries conviction. Sometimes confidence is all that's needed.
- Future
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- Nov 07, 2020
America is a living idea. It isn't only the tenets of its founding, but also the terms of its future. Every day, we make America. Seeking to preserve and enshrine one vision of this country from one period of its past robs it of what makes it magical: its infinite possibility for adjustment.
- Long
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- Nov 07, 2020
Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
- Never
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- Nov 07, 2020
I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.
- Knowledge
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- Nov 07, 2020
Life is a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.
- Live
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- Nov 07, 2020
To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.
- Inaction
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- Nov 07, 2020
Use the losses and failures of the past as a reason for action, not inaction.
- Cure
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- Nov 07, 2020
The standard formulation on remedy is that it ought to cure past violations and prevent their recurrence. That's what antitrust is all about.
- Life Is Too Short
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm not someone who dwells upon past events, taking the view that life is too short.
- Matter
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- Nov 07, 2020
As a Scot, representing a Scottish constituency for almost the past 25 years, I do not harbour an overweening ambition to pronounce on each and every matter exclusively English.
- World
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- Nov 07, 2020