I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
Walt Whitman

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.
Chuck Palahniuk

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
Golda Meir

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.
Charles Darwin

Internationally, President Obama has adopted an appeasement strategy. He believes America's role as leader in the world is a thing of the past. I believe a strong America must - and will - lead the future.
Mitt Romney

Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.
Woodrow Wilson

I will not speak with disrespect of the Republican Party. I always speak with respect of the past.
Woodrow Wilson

And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.
James Madison

We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice.
Stephen Covey

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
George Bernard Shaw

By recollecting the pleasures I have had formerly, I renew them, I enjoy them a second time, while I laugh at the remembrance of troubles now past, and which I no longer feel.
Giacomo Casanova

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
Lewis Mumford

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
Rene Descartes

Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.
Harry S. Truman

What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now.
William Glasser

What lingers from the parent's individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting.
Virginia Satir

In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past - a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.
Henri Frederic Amiel

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
George Orwell