Top 100 History Past Future Quotes
#1. I lost a girlfriend when I was in my 30s. She was 46. It all sounds so trite, but I put a Post-it on my dressing-room wall. It said, 'The past is history. The future is a mystery. This moment is a gift, which is why it's called the present.'
Samantha Bond
#2. If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.
Robert Penn Warren
#3. To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too-that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.
Paula McLain
#4. History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.
Robin Hobb
#5. Cut the umbilical cord to yesterday. Although we can't change history, we change the effect the past has on the future.
Lee Ezell
#6. History teaches the young the virtues of freedom. By apprising them of the past it will enable them to judge the future.
Thomas Jefferson
#7. History can't be left to fend for itself. For when it comes to history and beliefs and values, we turn our future on the lathe of the past.
Max De Pree
#8. Shakespearean tragedy is neither ancient history nor fairy tale. Perhaps to express this is the most important thing. In which period does the action of the play take place? It is in that past which can become the future.
Grigori Kozintsev
#9. Look, you think I like history because I'm fascinated with the possibilities, with how it could have happened, but you're wrong. I like it because it's the one thing we actually know in life. The past is the only thing we can count on. The present? The future? They're anyone's guess.
Rebecca Serle
#10. Maybe Rachel was right all along. Maybe the past is past, history is history, and you just push it aside and look for the future.
Barry Lyga
#11. To reclaim our past and insist that it become a part of our human history is the task that lies before us. For the future requires that women, as well as men, shape the world destiny.
Judy Chicago
#12. We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#13. History by apprising them [the people] of the past will enable them to judge of the future ... It will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men: it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.
Thomas Jefferson
#14. In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.
Anne Bogart
#15. For the modern physicist, reality is the whole thing, past and future joined in a single history. The sensation of now is just that, a sensation, and different for everyone. Instead of one master clock, we have clocks in multitudes.
James Gleick
#16. The lessons of past is critical for teachings in present. And experience in the future.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#17. History was a crystal ball that told as much about the future as it did about the past.
Robert Kurson
#18. The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations and more. A form without a history has no power to perpetuate itself. What has no past can have no future.
Cormac McCarthy
#19. God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
Ambrose Bierce
#20. Ah, yes, choice. I chose to let my ghosts stay in past. Past is history you know. Living is now. I sat. I breathed. I let past go. I let future go. I am. That is all.
Natalie Wright
#21. For the first time in the history of mankind, one generation literally has the power to destroy the past, the present and the future, the power to bring time to an end.
Hubert H. Humphrey
#23. The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence
T. S. Eliot
#24. Then a man turned
And said to me: Although I love the past, the dark of it,
The weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the all
Of it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first century more ...
Mark Strand
#25. We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.
Allan Bloom
#26. In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.
Anthony Doerr
#27. History flows neither from the past nor to the future alone: it reverses its course and, when you get right down to it, flows from all the presents.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#28. What I've done in the past is history and what I'm gonna do in the future is a mystery
Mike Tyson
#29. The Times are the masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#30. Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look.
James Burke
#31. Presence is like a gap in the flow of history, where all of [a] sudden it is not past and not future.
Peter Zumthor
#32. History is the heritage and patrimony of mankind in its lessons of the past that give priceless inspiration for the future.
Henry Clausen
#33. No one is innocent in the tide of history. Everyone has kings and slaves in his past. Everyone has saints and sinners. We are not to blame for the actions of our ancestors. We can only try to be the best we can, no matter what our heritage, to strive for a better future for all.
Diana Peterfreund
#34. The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.
Patricia Hampl
#35. Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.
Lewis H. Lapham
#36. P.S. I offer a topic for discussion. The past is nothing more than the present romanticized, while the future is history with imagination. Any thoughts?
Scott Wilbanks
#37. For Nautzera there was no present, only the clamour of a harrowing past and the threat of a corresponding future. For Nautzera, the present had receded to a point, had become the precarious fulcrum whereby history leveraged destiny. A mere formality.
R. Scott Bakker
#38. You don't need to go that far in the future, you just have to go 2000 years ago,
Paulo Coelho
#39. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
John Berger
#40. We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.
Chuck Palahniuk
#41. Pannenberg's conception of retroactive continuity ultimately means that history flows fundamentally from the future into the past, that the future is not basically a product of the past.
E. Frank Tupper
#42. Do not die in the history of your past hurts and past experiences, but live in the now and future of your destiny.
Michelle Obama
#43. History is alwys written by victors, and the defeated create a new set of myths to explain the past and gild the future
Morris L. West
#44. Not everything in your past qualifies to be called HISTORY; only the things in the past that shaped your FUTURE
Fela Durotoye
#45. No matter how troubled a character's history, romance novels tell us, love can be built upon it, and happily-ever-after can result. What's more, the darker the past, the brighter the future - and the better the read.
Sarah MacLean
#46. Think of tomorrow, the past can't be mended.
Confucius
#47. Contrary to popular belief: Knowing where you are from will not really tell you where you are going. It will merely tell you why you are where you are.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#48. We have nothing to fear for the future, except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us, and His teaching in our past history.
Ellen G. White
#50. Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.
James Robertson
#51. After voluntary exertions on the part of our people to which the history of the world furnishes no parallel, is the old root of bitterness still to remain in the ground, to sprout and bear fruit in the future as it has borne fruit in the past?
Robert Dale Owen
#52. Our children may learn about the heroes of the past. Our task is to make ourselves the architects of the future.
Jomo Kenyatta
#54. In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.
Sarah Vowell
#55. More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Penn Warren
#56. The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
Jessamyn West
#57. History, by apprising [the people] of the past, will enable them to judge of the future.
Thomas Jefferson
#58. We have to forget the past. History is something that even today we are paying the consequences, and the future is integration. We all as a people, as citizens, as the leadership of both countries should be looking in that direction.
Atifete Jahjaga
#59. History is the long shadow cast by the past upon the future. Shadows, by nature, lack details.
Ken Liu
#60. We make the future better than the past. We don't hide from history. We make history.
John McCain
#61. History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.
John F. Kennedy
#62. History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.
Aidan Chambers
#63. Each age selects its own geniuses from the past to suit its own needs. It's always been that way.
Seb Kirby
#64. Why would I talk about the past when I got a bright future? What kind of money is the past gonna make me? Everyone wants to know information. Now, if you wanna know information, if you want history, you're gonna read a history book. The past ain't gonna make you no cash.
Riff Raff
#65. 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.
Edward Gibbon
#66. In becoming archaeologists of the world of our mothers, we are trying to retrieve the female past and to invent a future.
Louise Bernikow
#67. History is really a study of the future, not the past.
Arundhati Roy
#68. Philosophers have argued without a trend toward order; time would lack meaning. The future would be indistinguishable from the past. Sequences of events would be just so many random scenes from a thousand novels. History would be indistinct, like the mist slowly gathered by treetops in evening.
Alan Lightman
#69. The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.
John F. Kennedy
#70. There is much to learn about what could happen in the gardens of the future, should designers wish to learn about the past.
Tom Turner
#71. In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.
Edmund Burke
#72. The man for whom history is bunk is almost invariably as obtuse to the future as he is blind to the past.
J. Frank Dobie
#73. What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
Victor Hugo
#74. History is the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instructor of the present, and monitor to the future.
Miguel De Cervantes
#76. Kids born today will see us navigate past the first greatest test of humanity, which is: can we actually be smart enough to live on a planet without destroying it?
Alex Steffen
#77. A historian ought to be exact, sincere and impartial;
free from passion, unbiased by interest, fear, resentment or affection;
and faithful to the truth, which is the mother of history the preserver of great actions, the enemy of oblivion, the witness of the past, the director of the future.
B.R. Ambedkar
#78. 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.
Augustine Birrell
#79. The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#80. We live and die by our stories if we don't rewrite our own history. The past is merely what we make of it, the future ours to create. Rewrite revise, erase.
Sheryl Mallory-Johnson
#81. The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to
be imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.
Paul Fussell
#82. Without a good understanding of history how can we make informed and therefore good and sensible decisions about current issues? The future then can only be made better by knowledge of the past.
Keith Tonkin
#83. To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually [essentially?] happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).
Leopold Von Ranke
#84. Today can be better than the worse of yesterdays, but tomorrow can never replace the best of yesterdays.
Anthony Liccione
#85. If the future remains uncertain, we know the past history of nationalism. And that should be sufficient to encourage a habit of watchful suspicion.
Michael Billig
#86. History was once the future, the future will create history.
Daniel J. Hill
#87. To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past.
Eric Hoffer
#88. History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.
Ludwig Von Mises
#89. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.
Robert Kennedy
#90. Our past shapes our future whether we realize it or not. Remembering well is as important as doing well." -- Jonita Mullins
Jonita Mullins
#91. When a man is interested in the past he writes history; when he is interested in the future he makes it.
Will Durant
#92. TODAY is the PAST of your FUTURE. So, make TODAY count for the sake of your HISTORY. Use your words, time & choices wisely
Fela Durotoye
#93. We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.
Criss Jami
#95. I am captivated more by dreams of the future then history of the past.
Benjamin Franklin
#96. George Orwell said, "Whoever controls the past controls the future," by which he meant that history is incredibly important in shaping the world view of the next generation of people.
Howard Zinn
#97. History is a light that illuminates the past,
and a key that unlocks the door to the future.
Runoko Rashidi
#98. All our knowledge - past, present, and future - is nothing compared to what we will never know.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
#99. The future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.
C. D. Broad
#100. "History repeats itself" and "History never repeats itself" are about equally true ... We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.
G. M. Trevelyan
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
