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Past, Present and Future Quotes


Top 40 Past, Present and Future Quotes

 

No 1 (Best quote!)Past, Present and Future Quotes

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by avoiding it today.

- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) American president, pictured right.

 

 

No 2Past, Present and Future Quotes

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

- Peter Drucker (1909-2005), pictured right, American management writer.

 

 

No 3Past, Present and Future Quotes

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

- George Santayana (1863–1952), Spanish philosopher, pictured right.

 

Past, Present and Future Quotes

Edmund Burke (1729-97), pictured right, Irish-born British Member of Parliament, says similarly:

Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it

 

Past, Present and Future Quotes

But the American writer and poet, Maya Angelou (1928-2014), pictured right, is more optimsitic:

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but, if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

  Past, Present and Future Quotes

No 4

Creating the future doesn't require a company to abandon all of its past.

- Gary Hamel, pictured right above, and C.K. Prahalad, pictured right below, in Competing for the Future (1994)  Past, Present and Future Quotes

 

 

No 5Past, Present and Future Quotes

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present and future,

- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) American president, pictured right.

 

Lincoln also comments:

People who stay in the present will remain in the past.

 

 

No 6Past, Present and Future Quotes

Tomorrow is another day!,

(last line of Gone With The Wind, the 1939 film and Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel)

- Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh, pictured right, in the film).


 

No 7Past, Present and Future Quotes

Memories mean more to me than dresses.

- Anne Frank (1929-1945), child victim of the Holocaust, pictured right.

 

 

No 8Past, Present and Future Quotes

Neither a wise man, nor a brave man, lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969,)  American Second World War leader and president, pictured right.

 

 

No 9Past, Present and Future Quotes

Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.

- Alvin Toffler, pictured right, in Future Shock (1970)

 

 

No 10Past, Present and Future Quotes

Study the past if you would divine the future.

- Confucius (551- 479 BC), Chinese philosopher, pictured right.

 

Past, Present and Future Quotes

The American revolutionary, Patrick Henry (1736-99), pictured right, agrees:

I know of no way of judging of the future, but by the past

 

Past, Present and Future Quotes

But Edmund Burke (1729-97), pictured right, Irish-born British philosopher and politician, disagrees:

You can never plan the future by the past

 

 

No 11Past, Present and Future Quotes

We can only have one future, and it will be made of our dreams, if we have the courage to challenge convention.

- Soichiro Honda (1906-91), co-founder of Honda, pictured right.

 

 

No 12Past, Present and Future Quotes

You cannot fight against the future.

- William Gladstone (1809–98), British Prime Minister, pictured right.

 

 

No 13Past, Present and Future Quotes

If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

- Winston Churchill (1874–19650, British prime minister, pictured right.

 

 

No 14Past, Present and Future Quotes

History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition.,

- Henry Ford (1863–1947), American car manufacturer, pictured right.

 

 

No 15Past, Present and Future Quotes

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past ,

(Party slogan from the 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four)

- George Orwell (1903-50), English writer, pictured right  

 

 

No 16Past, Present and Future Quotes

I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future...I will not shut out the lessons that they teach,

(Scrooge in the 1843 novel A Christmas Carol)

- Charles Dickens (1812-70), pictured right, English writer.

 

 

No 17Past, Present and Future Quotes

Be not false about the past.

- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) Italian painter, sculptor, architect and engineer, pictured right.

 

 

No 18

Past, Present and Future QuotesI do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

- John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), English economist, pictured right.

 

 

No 19Past, Present and Future Quotes

We are all prisoners of our past.

- Charles Handy, pictured right, The Age of Unreason (1989).

 

 

No 20Past, Present and Future Quotes

Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, and I'm going to be happy in it.

- Groucho Marx (1890-1977), American comedian and film and TV star, pictured right.

 

 

No 21Past, Present and Future Quotes

Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

(Elizabeth in the 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice)

- Jane Austen (1775-1817), English writer, pictured right.

 

 

No 22Past, Present and Future Quotes

Fantasizing about the future is one of my favourite pastimes.

- Richard Branson (1950- ), pictured right, English founder of the British company, Virgin.

 

 

No 23Past, Present and Future Quotes

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), pictured right, American president.

 

 

No 24Past, Present and Future Quotes

The stupid speak of the past, the wise of the present and fools of the future.

- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), pictured right, French leader.

 

 

No 25Past, Present and Future Quotes

Never let the future, disturb you.

- Marcus Aurelius (121-180), pictured right, Roman emperor and philosopher

 

 

No 26Past, Present and Future Quotes

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

- Gautama Buddha (563-483 BC), pictured right, founder of Buddhism.

 

 

No 27Past, Present and Future Quotes

To be ignorant of the past is forever to be a child.

- Cicero (106-43 BC), pictured right, Roman philosopher and politician

 

 

No 28Past, Present and Future Quotes

Let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.

- Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), pictured right, Lebanese-born American philosopher

 

 

No 29Past, Present and Future Quotes

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher (pictured right).

 

 

No 30Past, Present and Future Quotes

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), pictured right, German-born American scientist.

 

 

No 31Past, Present and Future Quotes

It’s in vain, Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present,

(David Copperfield in the 1850 novel David Copperfield).

- Charles Dickens (1812-70), pictured right, English writer. 

 

 

No 32Past, Present and Future Quotes

The terrible thing is that it is impossible to tear the past out by the roots.

(Anna in the novel Anna Karenina)

- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian writer, pictured right.  

 

 

No 33Past, Present and Future Quotes

Memory always remembers the happy things.

- Bernard Lovell (1913–2012), pictured right, the British astronomer.

 

 

No 34Past, Present and Future Quotes

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

- Billy Wilder (1906-2002), pictured right, American film director.

 

 

No 35Past, Present and Future Quotes

It would be sad, if we missed our future because of our past.

- Charles Handy (pictured right), in Beyond Certainty, 1995.

 

 

No 36Past, Present and Future Quotes

The future is not what it was.

- Bernard Levin (1928-2004), English journalist (pictured right)

 

Past, Present and Future Quotes

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, pictured right, said something similar in a 1983 speech:

The future isn't what it used to be.

 

 

No 37Past, Present and Future Quotes

Be not false about the past

-Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), pictured right, Italian painter and engineer

 

 

No 38Past, Present and Future Quotes

The true paradises are the paradises we have lost.

- Marcel Proust (1871-1922), pictured right, French writer

 

 

No 39Past, Present and Future Quotes

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

- Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), pictured right, Irish writer.

 

 

No 40Past, Present and Future Quotes

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.

- Frederick Douglass (1818-95), American civil rights leader, pictured right.


 

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Quotes