Past Quotes - Page 72

Inflation is like toothpaste. Once it's out, you can hardly get it back in again.

I think that compared to other politicians who have been put in jail in the past, compared to the human-rights activists in history who have had to face political prosecution, the activists in Hong Kong nowadays are already quite lucky compared to that.

This war is not as in the past: whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system.

The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.

You are not the mistakes of your past, but the resources and capabilities that you have gleaned from your past.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

I don't want to return to the past. I don't yearn for when I was 18 years old. I was in high school then. I had acne. I had a terrible hairdo. I'm sure I was sporting polyester pants.

Baseball has long been a national pastime that many Americans have cherished.

Religion is like our appendix, a vestigial remnant from a primitive past. Perhaps in a few millennia the god of Abraham will invoke the same curious amusement as rain and sun gods do today. Or perhaps our god will simply be shelved along with Zeus and Jupiter. Some day. But until then, we suffer the consequences of a population that believes in the absence of evidence and, more curiously, rejects an objective reality that conflicts with beliefs easily proven false.

Your desire or beliefs will literally be reaching back into time, teaching the nerves new tricks. Definite reorganizations in that past will occur in your present, allowing you to behave in entirely new fashions. Learned behavior therefore alters not only present and future but also past conduct.

I think that if past lives are real then we have been lovers in every single one of them. I've known you for a short time, but I feel like I've known you forever.

In my view you can't go to the future if you haven't come from the past.

When Buddhists say, "A bodhisattva fears not the result, but only the cause," they mean that we must expend the bulk of our energy planting good roots today, rather than fretting about the plants that are already growing from the roots we planted in the past.

The wilderness that has come to us out of the eternity of the past, we have the boldness to project into the eternity of the future.

Clogged with yesterday's excess, the body drags the mind down with it.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

Creation is not taking place now, so far as can be observed. Therefore, it was accomplished sometime in the past, if at all, and thus is inaccessible to the scientific method.

Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.

Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each event freshly in its own right. If we did so, of what use would past experience be?

The future is dark, the present burdensome. Only the past, dead and buried, bears contemplation.

All nations are degrading and consuming their environment to a point beyond capacity. In the past 15 years in the U.S. we have added 1300 cities with populations over 100,000. When the environment is forced to file Chapter 11, the ecology collapses. Nations recover from war but not from a failed eco-system. The status of our environment is more threatening than all wars. It is forever.

In the past, I’ve had my share of good reviews, but it’s always the crazy, scary, weirdo guy. I don’t even know how it happened. Look at me. I mean, when I’m naked, I look like a bald chicken. How did I get to be a scary bad guy?

Every past is worth condemning.

In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles... Contemporary or postmodernist art... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.

Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.