Steven Soderbergh Quotes

Sometimes people who had been together for a long time got to imagining that things used to be better, even when they weren't.

There's a sort of romanticizing of the past. When you actually think about the past, you know it's a little different.

Posterity will say as usual: "In the past things were better, the present is worse than the past.

We are always yapping about the 'Good Old Days' and how we look back and enjoy it, but I tell you there is a lot of hooey to it. There is a whole lot of all our past lives that wasn't so hot.

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

I must admit that i am fascinated by the glories of ancient India. But when will the purveyors of Indian culture realise that not everything about our past was glorious?

'Mad Men' doesn't capture one single thing about the decor, costumes, or sexual interaction. It is a total projection of contemporary snarky attitudes into the past.

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

We tend to paint the past only in extremes, as having been either categorically better than the present or irredeemably bad.

I don't buy into the glory days thing. I think every time has its great things to it. The '60s were such a glorious time but it's easy to forget that there was all sorts of bullshit too.

You look back at a time you idealize now and you only remember the good stuff. You tell the stories about the hard stuff and just laugh about it now. You don't remember how difficult it was to be stranded in Austin after driving 52 hours from Seattle in a rainstorm and having nowhere to stay for five hours. You remember that stuff and laugh about it now. You don't feel it the way you did back then when you were so scared and nervous and tired and hungry. We always idealize the past because we don't feel the painful stuff the way we used to.

I'm of a generation that romanticizes and maybe even over-romanticized things that were painful, that hurt others. I feel that. But I don't know if I have any regrets.

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.

Why does the past look so enticing to us? For the same reason why from a distance a meadow with flowers looks like a flower bed.

To be honest, I tend to romanticize the past, and though I appreciate all the conveniences of modern life, sometimes I yearn for simpler times.

I grew up in the countryside . But there's a danger of us romanticizing that. Because when I was a kid in 1982, that's what my parents were saying to me about television and comics and computer games!

Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days.

The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.

I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.

The way you remember the past depends upon your hope for the future.

It's very odd, being older, because in a way it's hard to own the past, even.

In a funny way, I like the past, I'm a very nostalgic person.

I had so many adults around me reminding me that I was a kid. I also had a lot of adults saying things to me like, "When I was your age..." and sort of idealizing it. I didn't like that they idealized it.

I remember things the way they should have been.