Famous Quotes & Sayings

Chaim Potok

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

Chaim Weizmann

Now in the light of past and present events the bitter truth must be spoken. We feared too little and we hoped too much. We underestimated the bestiality of the enemy; we overestimtaed the humanity, the wisdom, the sense of justice of our friends.

Charlie Munger

Economic systems work better when there's an extreme reliability ethos. And the traditional way to get a reliability ethos, at least in past generations in America, was through religion. The religions instilled guilt. ... And this guilt, derived from religion, has been a huge driver of a reliability ethos, which has been very helpful to economic outcomes for man.

Charlie Munger

We have a higher percentage of the intelligentsia engaged in buying and selling pieces of paper and promoting trading activity than in any past era. A lot of what I see now reminds me of Sodomand Gomorrah. You get activity feeding on itself, envy and imitation. It has happened in the past that there came bad consequences.

Charlie Munger

It's human nature to extrapolate the recent past into the future, but it's terrible that managements go along with this.

Charlie Munger

It's simplicity itself that its future will be way worse than its past.

Charlie Munger

Berkshire's past record has been almost ridiculous. If Berkshirehad used even half the leverage of, say, Rupert Murdoch, it would be five times its current size.

Charlie Munger

It's a rare business that doesn't have a way worse future than it has a past.

Charlie Munger

A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind, loving diagnosis involving multiple variables. And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.

Charles Rangel

Now is the time for the U.S. and the nations of Western Europe who engaged in the slave trade throughout this hemisphere to come forward in a positive way to assist in undoing the harm that was caused by their past colonial policies in the hemisphere.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Third, consider the insistency of an idea. The insistency of a past idea with reference to the present is a quantity which is less, the further back that past idea is, and rises to infinity as the past idea is brought up into coincidence with the present.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Three elements go to make up an idea. The first is its intrinsic quality as a feeling. The second is the energy with which it affects other ideas, an energy which is infinite in the here-and-nowness of immediate sensation, finite and relative in the recency of the past. The third element is the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.

Charles Handy

We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything.

Charles Frazier

No looking back. Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past having nothing to do with anything but your own damn weakness. Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't.

Charles Frazier

The past is a stronger influence in the South. But I think everywhere you have this sense that the world changes faster than you can accommodate yourself to. Looking back and seeing how you got where you are is a useful way to combat disorientation.

Bob Parsons

I now know that I learn by solving problems as they arise. Rarely do we learn significant lessons, or significantly improve, any other way.

Bob Brown

Whereas our common past, out of Africa, saw a global diaspora of humankind, our common future depends on a global coming together and consensus, resulting in a more equitable distribution of the Earth's largesse. When Africa, which gave us the wealth of life, has that debt returned, the world will have come of age.

Billy Zane

I think the Titanic disaster has parallels today. The closest think I can think of is the silicon chip.. We're all kind of bowing to this computer god, thinking it's going to fix everything and we're geniuses for inventing this. And, you know, I just think we should pay attention to disasters of the past.

Bill Belichick

To live in the past is to die in the present.

Bill Belichick

If you sit back & spend too much time feeling good about what you did in the past, you're going to come up short next time

Bill Ayers

The US is indeed a terrorist nation. ...It's also the greatest purveyor of violence on earth over the past half century, and the foremost threat to world peace today.

Beth Moore

some of us have so much defeat in our past that we feel we lost the race before we knew it started.

Beth Moore

My very addictive personality and all sorts of strongholds are a thing of the past for me. Yet at the root of every single one of those issues was insecurity, something I had battled since childhood.

Beth Moore

When we think we’re at the mercy of our circumstances and past, we discount the power that is ours through the Holy Spirit.

Beth Moore

God wants to wipe away your past and lift your burdens. Do you let Him?

Bernard Malamud

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud.

Bob Lutz

In the past, (GM) produced a lot of very excellent vehicles but somehow they didn't excite anybody,

Bill Toomey

Past Olympians have a continuing role within the Olympic family.

We're going to predict that you're going to do about as well as you did in the past.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I saw and heard, and knew at last The How and Why of all things, past, and present, and forevermore.

Edgar Quinet

The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.

Edgar Guest

The world is no longer closed to us in the way it was in the past - present generations have unparalleled access to pretty much all corners of the globe.