Walter Kirn Quotes

We must remember that as the centuries go by, time will pass.

The Past, The Present, For the Future

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

Things are more like today than they have ever been before.

The future will be the child of the past and the present, even if a rebellious child.

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

The future has a lot to do with the past.

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.

We have to go into the past to go further and further into the future.

Never has the future become so rapidly the past.

You can never figure out what the future sounds like. As soon as you make it, it's the past.

Nothing is forever, but history is forever.

For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

While the river of life glides along smoothly, it remains the same river; only the landscape on either bank seems to change.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

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

I am only doing now what I have ever done; and ever will continue to do - that is adapting past experience to present reform in the light of high ideals and future objects.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

It's a question of whether we're going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.

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

Conservation destroys the present. If we are only busy preserving the past, we are not living in the present and unable to look forward. I am against conservation. We should let young people move forward, whether we agree with them or not. We should let new things happen.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

We are tomorrow's past.

The standards of the past are not the standards of the future.