History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.
He is not dead, this friend; not dead, Gone some few, trifling steps ahead, And nearer to the end; So that you, too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend You fancy dead.
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.
If you've got a good enough business, if you have a monopoly newspaper, if you have a network television station - I'm talking of the past - you know, your idiot nephew could run it. And if you've got a really good business, it doesn't make any difference.
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
I am any man's suitor,
If any will be my tutor:
Some say this life is pleasant,
Some think it speedeth fast,
In time there is no present,
In eternity no future,
In eternity no past.
We laugh, we cry, we are born, we die.
Who will riddle me the how and the why?
The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is.
I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial... I thought I knew a good deal about it all, I was sure I should not fail.
Society, magazines, posters, music videos, investment bankers. A lot of times, in my past anyway, looking within wasn't overly encouraged. Pretty much everybody proclaimed that fame would give me power and fortune.
. . . the mind is desperate to fix the river {of events} in place: Possessed by ideas of the past, preoccupied with images of the future, it overlooks the plain truth of the moment.