Terry Eagleton Quotes

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

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

The past after all is only another name for someone else's present.

In writing 'A Portrait of Athens' I have attempted - rather impressionistically - to give a panorama of its present. But I have also brought in its past because I sincerely think that there is a continuity.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

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

To understand the living present, and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

History is really a study of the future, not the past.

We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.

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

It is good to look to the past to gain appreciation for the present and perspective for the future.

We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

The past is the father of the present.

The good old days are neither better nor worse than the ones we're living through right now.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.

The new is always made up of the old, or rather, what people see in the new is always the old thing. The rear-view mirror. The future of the future is the present, and this is something that people are terrified of.