Lord Acton Quotes

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.

The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

We can neither ignore the history of the past nor create the future.

Each of us is tied, in some fashion, to the past. We are all part of a continuum.

There was, really, nothing you could use as a blueprint for your life, except your past. There was no starting over. There was only picking up the pieces someone had left behind.

The heritage of the past is the seed that brings forth the harvest of the future.

The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,--flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time.

Where are the links of the chain ... joining us to the past?

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.

The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present.

Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.

The future is always here in the past

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.

Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom to all.

As far as i am concerned, i am in the knowledge that death can never extinguish the torch which i have lit in Ghana and Africa. Long after i am dead and gone, the light will continue to burn and be borne aloft, giving light and guidance to all people

Institutions do live on their history.

The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.

The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn't want to suggest that the past determines the present.

Those who do not look upon themselves as a link, connecting the past with the future, do not perform their duty to the world.

Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.