Quotes on Past

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

Author: Berenice Abbott

The other inmates stand in a long straight line, flanked by guards, and I am dragged past them. I do not respect them, because they will not run - will not try to escape.

Author: Jack Abbott

Trying to sneak a fastball past Hank Aaron is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster.

Author: Joe Adcock

The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as the generation gap.

Author: Spiro Agnew

When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.

Author: Jean Anouilh

One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image.

Author: Timothy Ash

An astounding thing is that, almost every single week, I have met someone from my past.

Author: Michael Aspel

Lefty Grove could throw a lamb chop past a wolf.

Author: Arthur Baer

There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you if you don't repeat it.

Author: Pearl Bailey

Out of the past come the standards for judging the present; standards in turn to be shaped by the practice of present-day dramatists into broader standards for the next generation.

Author: George Baker

I went backwards and forwards over it until I was 22. And then in the past few years I began to say to myself, OK, look, I'm not messing around. This is something I want to attack, instead of thinking, I'll just see what happens with it.

Author: Christian Bale

I'm competitive with myself. I always try to push past my own borders.

Author: Tyra Banks

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

Author: Walter Benjamin

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

Author: Peter Berger

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

Author: Henri Bergson

I live for the present always. I accept this risk. I don't deny the past, but it's a page to turn.

Author: Juliette Binoche

Bobby and I have been to various reunions of Our Gang. We've been to like three or four reunions over the past 15 years or so. We were at one in Palm Springs, California.

Author: Tommy Bond

I have been wounded like this since about half past eight this morning and I will tell you how it happened.

Author: Francesco Borromini

We saw hundreds of programs to redevelop the central city, the neighborhoods, in the past.

Author: Jane Byrne

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

Author: John Cage

That's the past. I don't agree with retrospect.

Author: Steve Carlton

One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.

Author: Paul Cezanne

The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost.

Author: John Chapman

Some years I'm the coolest thing that ever happened, and then the next year everyone's so over me, and I'm just so past my sell date.

Author: Cher

And on this you have my pledge - unlike in the past, when you stood up and did what was right, this governor will not pull the rug out from underneath you - I will sign strong reform bills.

Author: Chris Christie

I wanted to make connections between Whale's past and present.

Author: Bill Condon

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

Author: Cyril Connolly

The discontented believe that their regrets are about the past.

Author: Mason Cooley

I found with this record I had to really be strong-willed, because in the past I've tended to tinker and add a thing or take a thing away, and nearly always been wrong.

Author: Elvis Costello

I haven't collected memorabilia. I am not a person who lives in the past.

Author: Yvonne Craig

I have had shoulder injuries in the past, but usually it's from training.

Author: Warren Cuccurullo

I am fascinated with times past.

Author: Frank Darabont

Even in Britain, the trade unions tell me that employment contracts have less protection than in the past.

Author: Jacques Delors

Kerry is an adult - he thinks things through. He learns from the present as well as the past. To George Bush, thinking things through is for sissies.

Author: Richard Dreyfuss

Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.

Author: Alan Dundes

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

Author: Helen Dunmore

If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

Author: Helen Dunmore

The past always looks better than it was. It's only pleasant because it isn't here.

Author: Finley Dunne

I appreciate what others have done in the past especially for my genre, and my style of singing. And they sure put a footprint - you know, they got the foot in the door, but I'm going to put my foot straight through the door.

Author: James Durbin

If you go too soon, you can come unstuck with 50m left when the guys are going past you.

Author: Michael East

So when you put the kick in and the other runners go past you, it's game over!

Author: Michael East

The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.

Author: Dwight Eisenhower

Praises for our past triumphs are as feathers to a dead bird.

Author: Paul Eldridge

The past cannot be cured.

Author: Elizabeth Elizabeth I

There have been a lot of changes in recruit training in the past twenty years.

Author: R. Ermey

I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime.

Author: Joe Eszterhas

You cannot survive if you do not know the past.

Author: Oriana Fallaci

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

Author: William Faulkner

I think that over the last few decades, we have seen better economic outcomes than in the past.

Author: Martin Feldstein

The past nine years in San Diego have represented such a period of questioning.

Author: Brian Ferneyhough

We had prepared, my staff had prepared for me a whole dossier on virtually - on George Bush on his votes on his records, what he had done over the past number of years in public service.

Author: Geraldine Ferraro

From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.

Author: Lion Feuchtwanger

When I left prison, I had to figure out how to embrace my past.

Author: Fernando Flores

Well, I wasn't going to tell anyone, but I've been seeing this really sweet guy for the past few weeks.

Author: Amber Frey

Scrooge pushed past Mary number 1 and Joseph number 2 in the wings without so much as an "excuse me". Typical.

Author: William Geist

I wouldn't trade the experiences I've had over the past 36 years for anything.

Author: Gil Gerard

I don't want to live on past records.

Author: Barry Gibb

To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.

Author: Andre Gide

I don't want to be disrespectful of the president of the United States, but as a political person, one of the things I appreciated about this president, in the past year especially, is he is a fantastic candidate.

Author: Ed Gillespie

Have you heard a single national figure tell you all of the crises of the recent past are not economic, they're cultural?

Author: Newt Gingrich

I appeared on a show with Jonathan Harris on it-the Bill Dana show-even before Lost In Space. Someone gave me a tape of it in the past year, but in all these years we hadn't remembered.

Author: Mark Goddard

The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.

Author: Doris Goodwin

In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere.

Author: Maxim Gorky

Ah, beware of snobbery; it is the unwelcome recognition of one's own past failings.

Author: Cary Grant

What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.

Author: Susan Griffin

I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.

Author: Godfrey Hardy

What you don't want to do is to hang on to the aging superstar past his prime and take resources away you can otherwise use to build a better overall team.

Author: Tom Hicks

I don't like parties past 2 am. Then it's all losers and weirdos.

Author: Paris Hilton

Happy is the person who cherishes the precious lessons of the past and lives vigorously in the present.

Author: Jerome Hines

An expert is someone who knows a lot about the past.

Author: Tom Hopkins

In the past, two colleagues died each season. It was generally accepted this could happen.

Author: Jacky Ickx

In the past, I'd sort of know before Ozzy sang something, what he was going to sing. I'd know what sort of way a melody was going to go 'cause of the way he'd approach it.

Author: Tony Iommi

The past is a great place and I don't want to erase it or to regret it, but I don't want to be its prisoner either.

Author: Mick Jagger

I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible.

Author: Karl Jaspers

The sediments of the past are many miles in collective thickness: yet the feeble silt of the rivers built them all from base to summit.

Author: John Joly

As you know, in the past several years, month after month, radio has increased its revenues - some of it even coming from Dot-Com advertisers. So, radio is a survivor.

Author: Casey Kasem

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

Author: Martin King, Jr.

The past, though it cannot be relived, can always be repaired.

Author: John LaFarge

The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?

Author: David Lawrence

I can no longer play at a level I was accustomed to in the past.

Author: Mario Lemieux

Employer contribution pension plans have become increasingly popular throughout the past two decades.

Author: Ron Lewis

I don't think you can run around and crash and bang quite the way that I might have done in the past.

Author: Eric Lindros

I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

Author: Penelope Lively

I do like to drive fast and I have gotten pulled over in the past. I use my skills to get out of tickets.

Author: Josie Maran

The segregated schools of today are arguably no more equal than the segregated schools of the past.

Author: Ed Markey

The chip comes from silicon foundries who have been running their plants for the past fifty years, understand mass manufacture, and are the area that is most likely to understand the volume increase problem.

Author: Mike Marsh

In the past, there has always been so much pressure about carrying a show and promoting a record.

Author: Richard Marx

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

Author: Golda Meir

It should be clear to all, after the past ten years, that NATO isn't attacking Serbia because of Milosevic; it is attacking Milosevic because of Serbia.

Author: Slobodan Milosevic

Joys too exquisite to last, And yet more exquisite when past.

Author: James Montgomery

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

Author: Errol Morris

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

President Bush has consistently used rhetoric, and that is not convincing given his past record.

Author: Grace Napolitano

What happened in the past is just that, the past. Champion or not.

Author: Steve Nash

I can't live off of yesterday - that's in the past.

Author: Juice Newton

It's been dawning on me slowly that for the past 35 years I have been cast against type, and I'm finally getting to do what I really wanted to do.

Author: Leslie Nielsen

Our educational system is like an automobile which has strong rear lights, brightly illuminating the past. But looking forward things are barely discernible.

Author: Hermann Oberth

One of my resolutions is to quit smoking. I've tried for the past two years, but this year I am going to stick with it.

Author: John Oldham

The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.

Author: Michael Ondaatje

Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

Author: Camille Paglia

In the past, I tried to be more of a typical session guitarist. I wasn't so concerned with impressing anybody.

Author: Brad Paisley

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

The mill cannot grind with the water that is past.

Author: Daniel Palmer

We have to look forward and keep filming new films and not get stuck in the past.

Author: Nick Park

Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.

Author: George Patton

There is no prodigy in our profession. If you see all the great singer of the past, none of them are.

Author: Luciano Pavarotti

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

Author: Harold Pinter

I have had many opportunities to visit universities all over the world in the past 50 years.

Author: John Pople

Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.

Author: Herbert Read

Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.

Author: Herbert Read

Never revisit the past, that's dangerous. You know, move on.

Author: Robert Redford

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.

Author: Agnes Repplier

The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn't be in flashback.

Author: Alain Resnais

Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role.

Author: Dennis Ritchie

The only thing to prevent what's past is to put a stop to it before it happens.

Author: Boyle Roche

My past is a bit checkered.

Author: Kid Rock

It was really a pleasure to play someone who's literally pushed past her breaking point repeatedly.

Author: Jeri Ryan

I've had a pilot every single year that didn't sell for the past four years, that'll smack you in the back of the head. I had a really good one last year; I wouldn't have done the play in New York if I had gotten that one.

Author: Bob Saget

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Author: George Santayana

We are all part of a tradition, at least we depend on the past.

Author: Klaus Schulze

The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.

Author: Bobby Scott

The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.

Author: Paul Scott

Look back, and smile on perils past.

Author: Walter Scott

What is past is prologue.

Author: William Shakespeare

There have to be more important things going on in the world than my past.

Author: Charlie Sheen

Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing, Thanks for mercies past received.

Author: John Sheffield

If we are to put the past on trial, where do we stop?

Author: Craig Shirley

The ball whizzes past like a bumblebee and the Indians are in the sea.

Author: Navjot Sidhu

I wanted to get away from my past and everything connected with it.

Author: Georg Solti

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.

Author: Sophocles

Where I am they can smell out a hurricane. My house survived Hurricane Hazel, but it didn't get past Hugo.

Author: Mickey Spillane

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

Author: Baruch Spinoza

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

Author: Anne Stael

Our greatest responsibility is not to be pencils of the past.

Author: Robert Stern

I'm really obsessed with the past.

Author: Fisher Stevens

Look to the past and remember no empire rises that sooner or later won't fall.

Author: Al Stewart

It's hard to avoid the past but one goes forward.

Author: Andy Summers

I came to New York late; I was already past 30.

Author: Jeffrey Tambor

I want to praise activists through the years. I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored.

Author: Studs Terkel

Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past.

Author: John Thorn

There isn't a dearth of it, but I will confess that it's harder for me to find songs on which I'm willing to invest anything from ten to fifteen hours writing an arrangement than it was in times past.

Author: Mel Torme

Which is not to discount everything I've done in my past; everything I have learned tremendously from.

Author: Rachel True

Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.

Author: Harry Truman

I was always attracted to the past as a kid.

Author: Stanley Tucci

I don't like to dwell on the past.

Author: Tina Turner

The past has to inform the present.

Author: John Turturro

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

Author: Kenneth Tynan

Because usually in the past when I was in a big band, that was all I did.

Author: Kathy Valentine

The curious defiled past him, after squeezing the Presidential fingers into the room, and settled either on the sofa or chairs or remained standing for protracted observations.

Author: Henry Villard

Rock and Roll has certainly tried to take its toll on me. I'd rather not talk about my past excesses here, although some hardcore rockers might argue that those excesses were responsible for some great records, but I know which side I came out on.

Author: Tony Visconti