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| The best of prophets of the future is the past | | Lord Byron | |
| The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down. | | A. Whitney Brown | |
| The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess | | James Thurber | |
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| The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened. | | P. L. Berger | |
| The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. | | Oscar Wilde | |
| The past may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme | | Mark Twain | |
| The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future. | | Marshall McLuhan | |
| The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be. | | Lillian Hellman | |
| The present is never our goal: the past and present are our means: the future alone is our goal. Thus, we never live but we hope to live; and always hoping to be happy, it is inevitable that we will never be so. | | Blaise Pascal | |
| The present time is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation. | | Samuel Johnson | |
| The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change. | | Thomas Carlyle | |
| The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down. | | T.S. Eliot | |
| Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions | | Samuel Johnson | |
| Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future. | | Ayn Rand | |
| We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future. | | Joseph Joubert | |
| We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible | | George Santayana | |
| We ought not to look back, unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience | | George Washington | |
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