Famous Quotes & Sayings

Deepak Chopra

Reality isn't a vast, fixed scheme trapping you without choice. At any moment you have the choice to break out of what is really trapping you-your automatic reactions dredged up from the past.

Edward Gibbon

History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.

In the past there was a difference between the conditions in which Hizballah operated in Lebanon and the conditions of resistance operated in Palestine.

Alexis de Tocqueville

As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.

Alexandra Ripley

But you know who you are when you're on your own out there in all that emptiness. There's no past, no holding on to the scraps that are all you've got left. Everything is that minute, or maybe tomorrow, not yesterday.

Mark McGwire

Like I said. I'm not going to talk about the past,

Lycos has experienced phenomenal success during the past several months,

Baruch Spinoza

The mind can only imagine anything, or remember what is past, while the body endures.

Augustine Birrell

I am far too much in doubt about the present, far too perturbed .about the future, to be otherwise than profoundly reverential about the past.

Augusten Burroughs

The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past.

Augusten Burroughs

You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.

Arthur Koestler

The Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text.

Arthur Koestler

The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

Arthur Miller

THE PRICE grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past, the seedbed of current reality, and the way to possibly reaffirm cause and effect in an insane world.

Arthur Miller

The brain heals the past like an injury ...

Art Buchwald

Tax reform is taking the taxes off things that have been taxed in the past and putting taxes on things that haven't been taxed before.

Art Buchwald

We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

I think that we have to do everything we can to work together, Democrats and Republicans, and then if we go the initiative route like we have done in the past, go together,

Ayrton Senna

The past is just data. I only see the future.

Azar Nafisi

The stories from Iran's present and past are reminders that freedom, democracy and human rights, or fundamentalism, fascism and terrorism are not geographically and culturally determined, but universal.

Azar Nafisi

Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.

Aziz Ansari

To be honest, I tend to romanticize the past, and though I appreciate all the conveniences of modern life, sometimes I yearn for simpler times.

Aziz Ansari

Others fear what the morrow may bring. I am afraid of what happened yesterday.

Ayn Rand

Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future -- if mankind is to have a future

Ayn Rand

There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain.

Bertrand Russell

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.

Benjamin Cardozo

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

Ben Goldacre

In the past, [medicalization]has been portrayed as something that doctors inflict on a passive and un-suspecting world - an expansion of the Medical Empire. But in reality, it seems that these reductionist bio-medical stories can appeal to us all, because complex problems often have depressingly-complex causes, and the solutions can be taxing, and unsatisfactory.

Ben Elton

For the past seventeen years I have been experimenting with lager. I am a lager user and one drug leads to another. If you do lager, as night follows day, you'll end up doing Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Barry Long

Any product of the mind is a reaction of the past, a synthesis of what is old.

Carl Sandburg

The past is a bucket of ashes