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| A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory | | John Steinbeck | |
| For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment | | Mark Twain | |
| God cannot alter the past, that is why he is obliged to connive at the existence of historians | | Samuel Butler | |
| He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past | | Henry David Thoreau | |
| He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future. | | George Orwell | |
| I don't think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking there's some kind of change. | | Bob Dylan | |
| I like men who have a future and women who have a past | | Oscar Wilde | |
| I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. | | Thomas Jefferson | |
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| I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now. | | Sophia Loren | |
| If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex? | | Art Hoppe | |
| In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding on the back of the tiger ended up inside. | | John Fitzgerald Kennedy | |
| In those days he was wiser than he is now; he used to frequently take my advice | | Winston Churchill | |
Lessons taught but never learned,
all around us anger burns.
Guide the future by the past.
Long ago the mould was cast. | | Neil Peart | |
| No man is rich enough to buy back his past. | | Oscar Wilde | |
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| One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged. | | Oscar Wilde | |
| Our duty is to preserve what the past has had to say for itself, and to say for ourselves what shall be true for the future | | John Ruskin | |
| Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed. | | Wayne Dyer | |
| Study the past if you would divine the future | | Confucius | |
