Top 100 The Past Is History Quotes
#1. You gotta live in the moment. I don't care what you've done in your life, it has nothing to do with what you're gonna do or what you can do. The past is history, tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift-that's why they call it the present.
Mike Ditka
#2. 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
#3. What I've done in the past is history and what I'm gonna do in the future is a mystery
Mike Tyson
#4. Follow your heart. The past is history and tomorrow, well, who knows what tomorrow brings.
Eve Carter
#5. All that matters is this moment and what you make of it, because the past is history and the future is just full of wishes that you can't foresee.
Austin V. Songer
#6. The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift.
Lisa Unger
#7. The past is history, the future's a mystery.
James Toback
#8. The past is history written in stone that can't be altered. The future is transitory and never guaranteed. Today is the only thing you can alter for certain. Make the most of it.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#9. Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?
Thomas Mann
#10. 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
#11. What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
Victor Hugo
#12. history is our attempt to reconstruct the past from the evidence that remains
Philip Parker
#13. I have issues with anyone who tries to claim that science is unworkable - creationists who deny evidence for past history, yet are happy to benefit from the products of the methodology that they otherwise deny.
Liz Williams
#14. Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?
Thomas Mann
#15. The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.
John F. Kennedy
#16. History is about the untold story, and writing historical fiction is a wonderful way to present the past in a compelling and entertaining way.
Paul W. Feenstra
#17. History is really a study of the future, not the past.
Arundhati Roy
#18. It seems to me ... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions ... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
Gustave Flaubert
#19. 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
#20. History is the long shadow cast by the past upon the future. Shadows, by nature, lack details.
Ken Liu
#21. But the history of independent India has remained a field mostly untilled. If history is 'formally constituted knowledge of the past', then for the period since 1947 this knowledge practically does not exist.
Ramachandra Guha
#22. I like reading about the past. I'm definitely not a history buff, but I do read a bit of history now and again, and to do that for work is really exciting.
James McAvoy
#23. We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
Umberto Eco
#24. Who owns history? Everyone and no one
which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.
Eric Foner
#26. Our children may learn about the heroes of the past. Our task is to make ourselves the architects of the future.
Jomo Kenyatta
#27. The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.
Dalai Lama
#28. The claim "oh, that's ancient history" is almost always a wish, am anxious attempt to put a boundary of time around some event that really is not over at all; it is a bid to silence the past.
Robert A. Orsi
#29. The only thing that interests me is history - reviewing the past and making something out of it.
Leon Redbone
#31. When there's a history between people, it makes for some serious complications - even in something seemingly as simple as friendship. There is no real starting over. There's only trying to minimize the importance of things in the past. And some events are just too life altering to trivialize.
Megan Thomason
#32. History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.
Grace Lee Boggs
#33. 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
#34. The point of history, the very essence of it as a field of study, is to find correspondences. You look at the past so that you can understand it, and through it you come to a better understanding of your own time. If you're lucky, sometimes you can even extrapolate to possible futures." "I'm not
M.R. Carey
#35. 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
#36. Each soil has had its own history. Like a river, a mountain, a forest, or any natural thing, its present condition is due to the influences of many things and events of the past.
Charles Kellogg
#37. The past actually happened. History is what someone took the time to write down.
A. Whitney Brown
#38. History is never the simple recounting of the past as it really was. It is inevitably an interpretation of the past, a retrospective vision of the past, which is limited both by the sources themselves and by the historian who selects and interprets them.
Timothy George
#39. Oh life to live, life already lived,
time that comes back in a swell of sea,
time that recedes without turning its head,
the past is not past, it is still passing by,
flowing silently into the next vanishing moment
Octavio Paz
#40. I love the Warner Brothers lot. There is so much history there. They've done such a smart thing. They have signs outside of each stage which tell you what movies and TV shows were shot inside. So cool ... you can almost feel the ghosts of actors past.
Valerie Azlynn
#41. All history is really nothing more than the application of ideology to the past.
Tom Clancy
#42. It is up to us, to everyone at Celtic Park, to build up our own legends. We don't want to live with history, to be compared with legends from the past. We must make new legends.
Jock Stein
#43. It's all history out there, Clemens. Your history, my history. You and me, boy, not dates and things. You and me. That's what history is all about. How we came to be here, in the way we are, the clothes we wear.
David Wiseman
#44. 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
#45. The risk of any great luxury brand that has its history in the past is that it can get dusty.
Maureen Chiquet
#46. Judgement is always based on experience and sometimes you will battle a person's history first, before commonsense will ever win the war.
Shannon L. Alder
#47. I've learned that history is the autobiography of the historian, that ignoring the past is the act of a fool, and that loyalty does not mean falling into line, but stepping out of it for the people you love.
Annie Barrows
#48. If past history was all that is needed to play the game of money, the richest people would be librarians.
Warren Buffett
#49. The history of the past is a mere puppet-show. A little man comes out and blows a little trumpet, and goes in again. You look for something new, and lo! another little man comes out, and blows another little trumpet, and goes in again. And it is all over.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#50. The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.
Walter Benjamin
#51. He gets away with it because he's strong.'
'This is the story of mankind.'
'I thought you were going to be a priest at one point.'
'Yes. But then I read the newspaper.
Christopher Buehlman
#52. A person in search of his ancestors naturally likes to believe the best of them, and the best in terms of contemporary standards. Where genealogical facts are few, and these located in the remote past, reconstruction of family history is often more imaginative than correct.
James G. Leyburn
#53. A reason that the past is so hated by the young is that there is no way to be entirely free of it.
Paul Horgan
#54. Much of the study of history is a matter of comparison, of relating what was happening in one area to what was happening elsewhere, and what had happened in the past. To view a period in isolation is to miss whatever message it has to offer.
Louis L'Amour
#55. All the past is a lie. All history, all memories, all of it, are just illusions. None of it is who your are. The very next thing you do....that is who you are.
Don Elwell
#56. 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
#57. History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam papers. It is not about judging the dead. It is about understanding the meaning of the past - to realize the whole evolving human story over centuries, not just our own lifetimes.
Ian Mortimer
#58. Such terminological difficulties remind us that history, despite its popular identification with the past, is at all times most relevant to the present.
Rian Thum
#59. In general, life is better than it has ever been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word : Dentistry.
P. J. O'Rourke
#60. The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past ... The writing of history liberates us from history.
Benedetto Croce
#61. 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
#62. History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.
Johan Huizinga
#63. It is not often that nations learn from the past,even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.
Henry Kissinger
#64. I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.
Mark Twain
#65. To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to live the life of a child forever. For what is a man's life, unless woven into the life of our ancestors by the memory of past deeds?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#66. A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.
Robert Penn Warren
#67. We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present
Russell Kirk
#68. Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.
G. M. Trevelyan
#69. Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly.
Norman Davies
#70. 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
#71. None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history.
Hannah Arendt
#72. It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can
it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
Samuel Butler
#73. At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet.
Thomas Carlyle
#74. [W]e are the heirs of a past of rope, fire, and murder. I for one am not ashamed of this past. My shame is for those who became so inhuman that they could inflict this torture upon us.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#75. The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
Theodor Adorno
#76. I think it is vitally important to study History. If we are going to lead Britain safely into the future, it is essential that we understand our country's historical roots. If we can learn the lessons of the past, we will be able to avoid making mistakes in the future.
Tony Blair
#77. The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.
G.K. Chesterton
#78. The beautiful thing about history is that we keep repeating it. So if you know the past, you know the future.
L.G. Rivera
#79. What rivets me to history is seeing / acts of survival turned / to rituals of self-hatred. This / is colonization. Unborn sisters, / look back on us in mercy where we failed ourselves, / see us not one-dimensional but with / the past as your steadying and corrective lens.
Adrienne Rich
#80. The past has come apart
events are vagueing
the future is inexploitable
Mina Loy
#81. STG and the Ramshorn Theatre are a vital part of Glasgow's rich cultural history. To abandon them now is to abandon not only our past, but our future.
Peter Capaldi
#82. Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy ...
Salman Rushdie
#83. History is important because it teaches us about the past. And bylearning about the past, you come to understand the present, so that you may make educated decisions about the future.
Richelle Mead
#84. You need the past as a guideline. The history of music is a good basis, but to escape that stuff, that tortuous rulebook, you have to learn it first. It's kind of like religion - once you've written the Bible, that's it, move on.
John Lydon
#85. I always tell people that if they want to know about the history of a country, do not go to the history books, go to the fiction. Fiction is not fiction. It is the substance and heartbeat of a people's life, here, now, and in the past.
Chenjerai Hove
#86. History is what we read, write and think about the past.
Michael Howard
#87. Mafia landmarks are found everywhere in beautiful Sicily, an unfortunate byproduct of the island's tragic history. By mapping theses strange sites and telling the amazing stories behind them, I hope to remind readers that the Mafia is not a romantic relic of the past.
Carl Russo
#88. There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed.
Hannah Lillith Assadi
#89. Who knows what's for true once a time is past? There's no way to prove how something was that's gone. And if a time is gone, what does it matter? It's all rain into rivers now.
Jo Dereske
#90. Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.
A.A. Gill
#91. Human migration is an important part of our ancestral story. The places we live shape us, the places we leave behind forges our history, and the places we might travel to becomes our mysterious future.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#92. The past is a reality that exists just beyond our reach.
Joanna Denny
#93. History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.
James Ellroy
#94. Conventionally, one looks at history as something of the past. But after Einstein, who knows what is in the past and what is in the present?
Roland Joffe
#95. History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
Hilary Mantel
#96. Peter Jones's is a vital public service. He reminds us that while we shouldn't live in the past, we are wiser and stronger when we live with it.
Bettany Hughes
#97. Man is an historical animal, with a deep sense of his own past; and if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will integrate it by a history implicit and false.
Geoffrey Barraclough
#98. People forget history nowadays, he lamented, that is what the ego does, making one the prisoner of one's inflated present, ignoring the humble past one has lived.
Aporva Kala
#99. Adam was told to toughen up. Get over it. We hear this a lot. History is in the past, bad things happened but it is time to move on. But history is not past for us. Adam
Stan Grant
#100. If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.
Elizabeth Kostova
