#past

The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. ↗

— Isaiah Berlin

#certainties #childhood #craving #desire #eternal

Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past. ↗

— Norman Borlaug

#famine #future #human #in the past #instead

I have been wounded like this since about half past eight this morning and I will tell you how it happened. ↗

— Francesco Borromini

#been #eight #half #half past #happened

But my point is these Civil War songs were gruesome. The hatred that's so bad in this country today, and for the past 10 or 15 years, bad as it is, is nothing compared to the kind of things people would write down and sing back in the Civil War. ↗

— T-Bone Burnett

#bad #civil #civil war #compared #country

It may not be possible to get rare roast beef but if you're willing to settle for well done, ask them to hold the sweetened library paste that passes for gravy. ↗

— Marian Burros

#beef #done #get #gravy #hold

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. ↗

— William Ellery Channing

#books #dead #distant #god #heirs

Our enemies are our evil deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of figure to express. ↗

— George A. Smith

#deeds #evil #express #figure #habit

People who say that yesterday was better than today are ultimately devaluing their own existence. ↗

— Karl Lagerfeld

#existence #fashion-designer #future #life #new-begining

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw. ↗

— William Maxwell

#revision #revisionism #the-past #change

Sometimes a word, a sound, triggers an image or recollection of something forgotten. A search for the truth sounds romantic, a thoughtful quest. As often as not, it is as mind numbing as reading a list of names or looking through scores of obtuse documents in the hope of finding a clear pattern, divined by not much more than intuition and observation. A shrugged-off remark can lead to more truth than studied responses to severe cross-examination. ↗

— Jackson Burnett

#jackson-burnett #lawyers #the-past-never-ends #the-search-for-truth #romantic