Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I feel blessed in the knowledge that I probably belong to the last generation that will remember what we call "traditional America."

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

To endeavor to rehabilitate the sabbath of our forefathers is as foolish as to try to make people go back into log houses and cook in a fire-place. Some persons can never realize that the world grows; that what was a help to one age becomes a hindrance to another; that time corrects the mistakes of men and that respect and reverence for our ancestors does not necessarily require us to adopt their clothes or their habits.

I think it's easy to hold on to this romantic hope that communities such as Niaqornat won't change, because we're in this world where progress is unstoppable, and they're a link to some idealised past.

I think some people are just very passionate that things remain the way they were when they were kids.

For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.

The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.

I love history... everything is inspired by history, so that's why I love vintage and antiques.

People say, oh it's a shame, you're not nostalgic about the '60s. Well actually, it's quite good, when you think of it. Wouldn't it be sad if I was sitting here wishing it back?

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear.

One who uses an ancient rule to govern the present does not necessarily see the changes that have taken place.

History takes time... History makes memory.

Events have moved on, yet some people still keep talking about the past.

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.

You can embrace nostalgia and history and tradition at the same time - it has to progress or it can't survive.

I just love learning about the past and everything we've been through as people and as a country.

History matters.

I grew up listening to everybody.

We celebrate the past to awaken the future.

No generation can escape history.

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.

We need the rock of the past under our feet in order to spring forward into the future.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.