Ernest Gaines Quotes

We can't be beholden to the past.

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the past

It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday, which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.

We may make progress only by freeing ourselves from the rut of the past, but without this rut an orderly society would hardly be possible in the first place.

The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.

History, the winnowing wind, never halts. We see the chaff rise, forget the waiting grain, seed of the future, fallen to the threshing floor. We never learn, but live on, slit-narrow, as if our living were a pencil line traced upon paper, behaving as trapped denizens of a flat world hemmed in by the bigoted horizon of our own making. Yet the meaning of living is a pushing back, a pulling down of the great walls and domes of fear and ignorance, is relinquishing the nest for the sky, ignorance for understanding. The look back is also a look forward.

The new is threatening to those who have mastered the old.

When you talk about change, you know what makes it really tough for people is on the one hand you've got tradition, and on the other hand you've got change; in many people's mind, change equals modernization. Tradition, however. I'm a big tradition guy.

If we learn the art of yielding what must be yielded to the changing present, we can save the best of the past.

We need to open up the future. We also need to keep everything valuable from the past.

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.

Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.

I am not nostalgic about things. When you have a kind of improvement, I am not nostalgic about the past.

We don't have to be imprisoned by the past. When something isn't working, we can and should change.

Sometimes, when a tide starts to sweep, it makes no difference what the traditions are.

Too much we have lived in our history. We must live in the future.

We need not be prisoners of our history.

What was good enough for my father is good enough for me" is a treasured English axiom which, if strictly carried out, would have kept us to wooden ploughs and water clocks. In these days we need to be inoculated with some of the nervous energy of the Americans.

There is always room for understanding towards those who see the old ways crumbling. And today I say simply this: It must come. It is right that it should come. And when it does, you will find that a burden has been lifted from your shoulders too.

You can't allow tradition to get in the way of innovation. There's a need to respect the past, but it's a mistake to revere your past.

If we remain hostage to our past, then we will go nowhere.

If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.