Antony Beevor Quotes

At odd and unpredictable times, we cling in fright to the past .

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

I never look forward, because I have no idea about how any of it happened to getting here. I've no idea how the next five years are going to be.

You've got to bumble forward into the unknown.

He that's secure is not safe.

I've gotten to the point that I don't even know what tomorrow brings. When I'm teaching, obviously I'm in town for the class every week.

Sureness is something like a neck brace, which we clamp around our lives, hoping to somehow protect ourselves from the frightening, constant whiplash of change. Sadly, the brace doesn't always hold.

I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.

Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing.

We are going through a terrible crisis. We do not know exactly what is going to happen, but in our hearts the pendulum of the seismograph is already swinging.

I think that people are so insecure in their jobs, they're so uncertain that the people they work for really care about them, they're so uncertain about what their kids are looking at in the future, that people are reluctant to take any risks for change.

We cannot always assure the future of our friends

It’s hard letting go in the past when there are no firm handholds in the future.

There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Give up security as an ideal. Anyone who promises security is misbranding his political, social, and economic goods ... If you insist on being cheated, buy gold bricks or perpetual motion machines. It is now clear that if you live at all, you will live dangerously, not only during the instant crisis but for all our lives

The way to feel safe is never to feel secure.

The future is inherently full of discontinuities, and lessons of the past must be applied with enormous caution.

Often we want to go back to the familiar, go back to where we felt our life pause, but nothing is ever the same.

What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.

There is no security in following the call to adventure.

The future is always scary to those who cling to the past.

We want the safety of yesterday even though we know it's not where God would have us.

Leaving high school. It's sad and you're going to miss all your friends. You're going to miss your life and you've been doing that for the past four years, and it's comfortable. But now, there's something possibly bigger on the horizon, just new and fresh and exciting. I think we all kind of felt like that.