Ann Widdecombe Quotes

Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.

I'm interested in Scotland now and then, how it's changed. I want to get the reader to think about that by thinking about something from the past. How has society changed, how has policing changed, have we changed philosophically, psychologically, culturally, spiritually?

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

Every film that is made about the past is always a reflection of the present.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

Over the past few years, many of us have increasingly begun to question the direction and meaning of our society as it has developed over the past several centuries.

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

People talk about the '60s, but they were merely a mass production of what the '50s had begun.

Things aren't much wilder now, I don't think, than they were back then. Of course I just read about all the goings-on now. Ha.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

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

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.

I still can't get over the idea that respectable adults now go to see superhero movies and that such films get reviewed in the 'New Yorker.' Clearly, I am seriously out of step with the times.

Ere we can forecast the future we must understand the present and bring a just sense of proportion to our review of the history of the past.

Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it.

Ancient histories provide windows to knowing current affairs.

Each generation confronts new problems, encounters new facts, and tells our history somewhat differently.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

No single conflict from the past can serve as a reliable model for struggles in the present.