History News Network Quotes

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.

The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us

I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

The now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.

The Past, The Present, For the Future

What happened yesterday affects today; what happens today will affect tomorrow/

The more you read about history, the more you realize that there is nothing new under the sun.

Events are as much the parents of the future as they were the children of the past.

The events of future history ... will be of the same nature—–or nearly so—–as the history of the past, so long as men are men.

There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

My future is in my past and my past is my present. I must now make the present my future.

One faces the future with one's past.

They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.

History never really says goodbye. History says, 'See you later.'

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

The future is made of the same stuff as the present.

I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

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

What happens today can affect what happens tomorrow, but it cannot affect what happened yesterday.