Winston Churchill Quotes

Ere we can forecast the future we must understand the present and bring a just sense of proportion to our review of the history of the past.

I am not interested in the past, except as the road to the future.

The most reliable way to forecast the future is to try to understand the present.

The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.

I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.

Art is for entertainment purposes, but it's also to reflect our dreams, our hopes, the present, the future the past - whether it's good or bad.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

I'm trying to get to a deep future, but in order to get to a deep future, I had to think about the deep past.

I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues of the past and thereby contribute to understanding the issues and conditions of the present and future.

I'm a historian. I really like the past. But most people seem far more interested in what you can tell them about the future.

'Nowness' is a dynamic relation between the past and the future.

Copernicanism and other essential ingredients of modern science survived only because reason was frequently overruled in their past.

Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future.

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

Presence is like a gap in the flow of history, where all of [a] sudden it is not past and not future.

The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.

We are always looking into the future, but we see only the past.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

Every generation has the right to build its own world out of the materials of the past, cemented by the hopes of the future.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

Intellectuals ought to study the past not for the pleasure they find in so doing, but to derive lessons from it.

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

The absence of romance from my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

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.