Quotes About Predecessors

#1. It is but too common, of late, to condemn the acts of our predecessors and to pronounce them unjust, unwise, or unpatriotic from not adverting to the circumstances under which they acted. Thus, to judge is to do great injustice to the wise and patriotic men who preceded us.

John C. Calhoun

#2. Where would we have been without the discoveries of our predecessors, and where are we going without your discoveries?

Ogwo David Emenike

#3. Through the years you, the Delaware State family and your predecessors, have faced many challenges. You worked through them with fierce determination and good will, and you have made great progress.

Michael N. Castle

#4. In 2003, Congress should have resisted the rush to a war of choice with Iraq. I will do everything in my power to prevent us from repeating the mistakes of my predecessors.

John Garamendi

#5. Every work of art changes its predecessors.

Mason Cooley

#6. To this day I always insist on working out a problem from the beginning without reading up on it first, a habit that sometimes gets me into trouble but just as often helps me see things my predecessors have missed.

Robert B. Laughlin

#7. Unlike his predecessors, Obama is not big on 'Masterpiece Theatre' nostalgia.

Tina Brown

#8. I recognize in [my readers] a specific form and individual property, which our predecessors called Pantagruelism, by means of which they never take anything the wrong way that they know to stem from good, honest and loyal hearts.

Francois Rabelais

#9. Growth theory did not begin with my articles of 1956 and 1957, and it certainly did not end there. Maybe it began with 'The Wealth of Nations'; and probably even Adam Smith had predecessors.

Robert Solow

#10. The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors ... Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects.

Marshall McLuhan

#11. I imagine, like all his predecessors, Barak Obama would like to achieve greatness in bringing peace in the Middle East. I hope it will not be at the expense of Israel.

Elie Wiesel

#12. One of my predecessors used to have people torn to death by wild tortoises. It was not a quick death.

Terry Pratchett

#13. Genius may anticipate the season of maturity; but in the education of a people, as in that of an individual, memory must be exercised, before the powers of reason and fancy can be expanded: nor may the artist hope to equal or surpass, till he has learned to imitate, the works of his predecessors.

Edward Gibbon

#14. Beneficiaries of the welfare states whose institutions they call into question, they are all Thatcher's children: politicians who have overseen a retreat from the ambitions of their predecessors.

Tony Judt

#15. OBSERVATORY, n. A place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of their predecessors.

Ambrose Bierce

#16. I always see other people as predecessors and admire them.

Judd Apatow

#17. We must distinguish better than some of our predecessors between desirable ends and unacceptable means.

Tony Judt

#18. I think it will be found that he who speaks with most authority on a given subject is not ignorant of what has been said by his predecessors. He will take his place in a regular order, and substantially add his own knowledge to the knowledge of previous generations.

Henry David Thoreau

#19. Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories. Forward steps in art are governed by the law of attraction, are the result of imitation of and admiration for beloved predecessors.

Boris Pasternak

#20. One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.

George Santayana

#21. Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price.

Alexander Herzen

#22. You want to do something that shows some type individuality and talent and imagination - at the same time, you want to be truthful to the predecessors, because obviously the audience liked something about them and you have to replicate that experience to a certain extent.

Renny Harlin

#23. Many in Taiwan believe that Hu Jintao is much more sophisticated than his predecessors in understanding Taiwan. He represents a different generation of leaders, more pragmatic, less ideological.

Ma Ying-jeou

#24. [O]pulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessors.

St. Jerome

#25. Assimilating the style of predecessors is necessary before one can develop one's own. Only by immersing oneself in the domain can one find out whether there is room left for contributing creatively to it, and whether one is capable of doing so.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#26. Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.

Margaret Thatcher

#27. You can't grow if you're going to say: 'The contributions of my predecessors are greater than anything I can ever achieve.' Each generation has to have a chance to find itself.

Christian Scott

#28. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.

C.S. Lewis

#29. History, at its best, always tells us as much indirectly about ourselves as it does directly about our predecessors, and it is often most revealing when it deals with episodes and phenomena that we find repulsive.

Edmund Morgan

#30. Maybe she still was a pretty-head, making up irrational stories about the empty forest. The longer she stayed alone out here, the more Tally understood why the Rusties and their predecessors had believed in invisible beings, praying to placate spirits as they trashed the natural world around them.

Scott Westerfeld

#31. With super PACs, we've seen voter turnout go up; interest in elections rise; and the number of competitive races increase. The campaigns of 2010 and 2012 have been more issue-oriented than their predecessors, not less.

Bradley A. Smith

#32. dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to enter the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own innovative genius.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#33. He that is pushing his predecessors into the gulf of obscurity, cannot but sometimes suspect, that he must himself sink in like manner, and, as he stands upon the same precipice, be swept away with the same violence.

Samuel Johnson

#34. We do not innovate anything ... How is it that novelties are introduced which were never even thought of by our predecessors?

Ambrose

#35. The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

Milan Kundera

#36. As long as you're in an environment where the worth of the project isn't based on the project but what its predecessors did, it's not truly inclusive.

Ava DuVernay

#37. As for the United States' future in Afghanistan, it will be fire and hell and total defeat, God willing, as it was for their predecessors - the Soviets and, before them, the British.

Mohammed Omar

#38. There was, of course, a global financial crisis. But our Labour predecessors left Britain exceptionally vulnerable and damaged: more personal debt than any other major economy; a dangerously inflated property bubble; and a bloated banking sector behaving as masters, not the servants of the people.

Vince Cable

#39. I am now old enough to make common cause with my predecessors against my successors.

Mason Cooley

#40. The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to narrow defeat.

Bill Kristol

#41. Three great ways to lose a lover:
Talk to him the way your mother talked to your father.
Berate him in public because everybody loves an audience.
Contrast him to your friends, and compare him with his predecessors.

Perry Brass

#42. Don't speak ill of your predecessors or successors. You didn't walk in their shoes.

Donald Rumsfeld

#43. Nothing is more disgusting than the majority: because it consists of a few powerful predecessors, of rogues who adapt themselves, of weak who assimilate themselves, and the masses who imitate without knowing at all what they want.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#44. Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.

Tony Hoare

#45. If I were a Catholic, I'd be asking what's going on here. I really would. "The pope also broke with his predecessors by suggesting that Catholic lawmakers are free to vote for same-sex marriage and civil unions."

Rush Limbaugh

#46. The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors.

Salman Rushdie

#47. Like their predecessors, the Presidents of today just throw up their hands.

Stephen Ambrose

#48. As one of my predecessors said, our objective is not to take people to heaven, but to prevent humanity from going to hell.

Kofi Annan

#49. You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don't break it. Don't break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That's not being faithful to what this country's about.

Barack Obama

#50. The medieval islamic world offered vastly more freedom than any of its predecessors, its contemporaries and most of its successors

Bernard Lewis

#51. Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

Emile M. Cioran

#52. Who can ever affirm, or deny that the houses which have sheltered us as children, or as adults, and our predecessors too, do not have embedded in their walls, one with the dust and cobwebs, one with the overlay of fresh wallpaper and paint, the imprint of what-has-been, the suffering, the joy?

Daphne Du Maurier

#53. It is preposterous that the current members of the United States Senate and all of their predecessors for more than 200 years haven't been able to read the Constitution and do what it says.

John Jay Hooker

#54. I will only say that many freedom fighters of India found their calling in the institutions of Britain. And many makers of modern India, including several of my distinguished predecessors, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Dr. Manmohan Singh, passed through their doors.

Narendra Modi

#55. It know we have a fashion of saying "such and such an event was the turning-point in my life," but we shouldn't say it. We should merely grant that its place as LAST link in the chain makes it the most CONSPICUOUS link; in real importance it has no advantage over any one of its predecessors.

Mark Twain

#56. Visit with your predecessors from previous Administrations. They know the ropes and can help you see around some corners. Try to make original mistakes, rather than needlessly repeating theirs.

Donald Rumsfeld

#57. In science, moreover, the work of the individual is so bound up with that of his scientific predecessors and contemporaries that it appears almost as an impersonal product of his generation.

Albert Einstein

#58. We, today, stand on the shoulders of our predecessors who have gone before us. We, as their successors, must catch the torch of freedom and liberty passed on to us by our ancestors. We cannot lose in this battle.

Benjamin E. Mays

#59. I am not bemoaning a diminishing awareness of references, but it's easier than ever to be divorced from both provenance an predecessors, to essentially be a cultural tease.

Carrie Brownstein

#60. Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.

Jim Morrison

#61. This volume follows in the same format as its predecessors, except that, at the suggestion of two reviewers of a previous volume, Biblical verses are identified, when recognized, for the benefit of our un-Biblical younger generation.

George Fenwick Jones

#62. Hindsight can be merciless. People of any given era often look back in time and wonder how their predecessors could have been so dimwitted.

James Balog

#63. I don't think JetBlue has a better chance of being profitable than 100 other predecessors with new airplanes, new employees, low fares, all touchy-feely ... all of them are losers. Most of these guys are smoking ragweed.

Gordon Bethune

#64. You know what happened to her predecessors?"
"Of course. It's sort of like the Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers. Bad things happen to them."
"Defense Against the Dark Arts?"
"You know, in Harry Potter.

David Baldacci

#65. Over the last 2,000 years, 10,000 saints have been named, among them, 78 popes. At the time of his death, Pope John Paul II had the distinction of naming 482 saints, more than all of his predecessors combined.

Chris Matthews

#66. I honestly don't read that much. Obviously I read chess books - in terms of favorites, Kasparov's 'My Great Predecessors' is pretty good.

Magnus Carlsen

#67. One has to bear in mind that one of the tactics of revolution is to destroy one's predecessors in authority at any cost or hazard.

Herbert Hoover

#68. In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.

Paul Gauguin

#69. We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.

Eugene Jarecki

#70. Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.

Vladimir Nabokov

#71. President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. Listen to me now. No president, not me, not any of my predecessors, no one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.

William J. Clinton

#72. Young Americans today are no more learned or skilful than their predecessors, no more knowledgeable, fluent, up-to-date, or inquisitive, except in the materials of youth culture.

Mark Bauerlein

#73. To the best of my knowledge, when I became national secretary and, indeed, Victorian secretary, the - my predecessors in the union had detected wrong activities, activities which aren't in the best traditions of the AWU or, indeed, trade unionism.

Bill Shorten

#74. Every student of science, even if he cannot start his journey where his predecessors left off, can at least travel their beaten track more quickly than they could while they were clearing the way: and so before his race is run, he comes to virgin forest and becomes himself a pioneer.

Theodore William Richards

#75. The unknown has undone many a president, and no matter the popularity of an Oval Office occupant, any and all presidents are vulnerable. Of course, one thing that seems to set Obama part from his recent predecessors is his ability to keep an inner calm about tough issues.

Chuck Todd

#76. Though we have less to worry about than previous generations, we have more worry. Though we have it easier than our forefathers, we have more uneasiness. Though we have less real cause for anxiety than our predecessors, we are inwardly more anxious.

Billy Graham

#77. When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it beforewhy do we think we can succeed now?

Joanna Russ

#78. The marriage of Zeus and Hera can hardly be reframed into a "happy one" and yet Hera is the Goddess of marriage. Hera and Zeus could be described as quarrelsome predecessors of the Holy Family. For the Greeks they symbolized marriage par excellence.

Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig

#79. It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors. We are not.

Mary Beard

#80. Well can I just say unlike my predecessors, Conservative and Labour, I have set up an independent body that studies whether what I'm saying is true, whether I've met the targets that I set out.

George Osborne

#81. I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.

George W. Bush

#82. Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes, and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.

John Jay Chapman

#83. History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.

Christopher Hill

#84. Our predecessors understood that the ties that bind America are far stronger than disagreements over any particular policy and far more durable and profound than any party affiliation.

Madeleine Albright

#85. Most thoughtful Americans of today seem to have forgotten how strongly their own and immediate predecessors, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman, were still preoccupied with the essence behind things.

Johan Huizinga

#86. New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.

Samuel Johnson

#87. We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.

Paul Cezanne

#88. The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.

Marshall McLuhan

#89. Business leaders should provide expertise in service of our country. My predecessors at GE have done so, as have leaders of many other great American companies.

Jeffrey R. Immelt

#90. Not that the moderns are born with more wit than their predecessors, but, finding the world better furnished at their coming into it, they have more leisure for new thoughts, more light to direct them, and more hints to work upon.

Jeremy Collier

#91. Zacharias's study bore the marks of his predecessors, whose taste had run decidedly stoicheiotical. They had had a fondness for skulls with burning lights in their eye sockets, crystal balls in which mysterious shapes came and went, and dark velvet window curtains traced with obscure runes.

Zen Cho

#92. It was something new that was happening everywhere. You couldn't miss it. If you needed to go to the grocery you would go to the predecessors of the big supermarkets of today.

William Eggleston

#93. All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product.

Jared Diamond

#94. The ability to forget the past enables people to free themselves gradually from the pain they once suffered; but it also often makes them repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.

Lu Xun

#95. We will never reach the world for Christ in our generation if we simply follow in the groove worn for us by our predecessors.

Melvin L. Hodges

#96. We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.

D.H. Lawrence

#97. immanent in their willingness to break the law was not so much a desire to sow chaos as a compulsion to instate a more just legal order. To the extent that our current rule of law is more capacious and emancipatory than its predecessors were, we owe much of that gain to lawbreakers.

James C. Scott

#98. With access to everything, we can dabble without really knowing. I am not bemoaning a diminishing awareness of references, but it's easier than ever to be divorced from both provenance and predecessors, to essentially be a cultural tease. The

Carrie Brownstein

#99. Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#100. I know Mischa, but you know how the politburo runs. If I say one word of this in there, I'll be out of my job the next day.' Remember, Gorbachev only became general secretary after he had kept his mouth shut under three predecessors.

Markus Wolf