Han Suyin Quotes

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

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

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

We cannot do justice to the deeds of former times if we do not in some degree remove ourselves from the circumstances in which we stand and substitute those by which the real actors were surrounded.

There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things.

We have to learn from the past.

The past is the prism through which we see a great, great, great deal of ourselves; it's a useful prism. It doesn't mean that we're fascinated by the dead or that we're fascinated by things that are settled. It is just one place where we can go to understand ourselves in the present.

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

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

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

I do not believe that any man can adequately appreciate the world of to-day unless he has some knowledge of -- a little more than a slight knowledge, some feeling for and of -- the history of the world of the past.

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

You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.

The only reason to keep talking about history is if you are juxtaposing it with the world that we live in today, if you are learning something about our world by looking at the way they shaped their world.

Can we ever understand the past, or do we just endlessly rework it to suit us in the present?

The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.

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.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

History is worth reading when it tells us truly what the attitude toward life was in the past.

If the present tries to sit in judgment of the past, it will lose the future.

It is difficult to judge the past by the criteria of the present.