Past Evaluation Quotes

There's nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.

We can be revisionist, and that's a good thing to be at times, but we shouldn't airbrush our history, so we can only make judgments in the objective conditions of that time.

What's important now? - To evaluate the past, focus on the future, and tell you what you have to do in the present

History is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

All the past is here, present to be tried; let it approve itself if it can.

In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.

There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past.

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

One must be careful not to prejudge the past.

History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.

We must admit that history is enjoyable to a large extent because it enables us to pass judgement on the past.

I don't concede it at all that the intelligence at the time was wrong.

When you look back, history is not going to be kind to these last 16 years from 2000 to 2016.