"For the past was once the future, and the present, but the future is not yet the past, but has the whole of its essence in existing in some after time."

"An overflowing pot must be emptied before anything new can be added. If you cling to the sorrows of the past, how can you make space for the happiness and joy of the present?"

"When emotion brings us ghosts from the past, only logic can root us in the present."

"How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?"

"The heart opens itself to the hope that the misfortunes of the past will be replaced by fruitful dialogue."

"To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future."

"The forensic historian . . . searches the past for material applicable to a current issue. The purpose of the advocate . . . is to use the past for the elucidation of the present, to solve some contemporary problem or, most often, to carry an argument. It is the past put in the service of winning the case at bar."

"Move backward to go forward. Shatter to mend. The past is now."

"If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future."

"The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future? [...] Nevertheless the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now."

"The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's."

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience."

"The past is to be respected and acknowledged, but not to be worshipped. It is our future in which we will find our greatness."

"By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes."

"Not to the present is our hour confined, The great and shadowy future is assigned To be the glorious empire of the mind. The past was once the future, and it wrought In the high presence of on-looking thought ; All that we have, was by its efforts brought. To-day creates to-morrow, and the tree Of good or ill grows in past hours, what we Make for the future — certain is to be."

"We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding. We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves. We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about — survival and growth."

"There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future."

"Law is one site to both “remember the future” and to insure that the future remembers. Perhaps by paying attention to how law serves memory we can gain new understandings of law’s crucial role in knitting together our past, present and future. Perhaps by attending to the contestation that inevitably accompanies efforts to materialize memory in law we can gain a better understanding of the ways that social conflict plays itself out on the terrain of remembrance."

"[A]t the crossroads of our history, we need to turn our backs on the past."

"On the day I left Chulak, Master Bra'tac said to me: "Draw from your past, but do not let your past draw from you.""

"So, change how you will, but never forget your past: it’s the ferryman you have to pay to get to your future."

"I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!"

"While law responds to historical change, it also makes history. Law writes the past, not just its own past, but the past for those over whom law seeks to exercise its dominion. Law constructs a history that it wants to present as authoritative, when, as Laura Kalman argues, no historian “considers the past authoritative.” And law uses history to tell us who we are."

"We often refer to space as the final frontier. But the older I get, the more I come to believe that the true final frontier is time. In command, as in life, what we do in crisis often weighs upon us less heavily than what we wish we had done, what could have been. Time offers many opportunities, but it rarely offers second chances. And as steps forward go I would like to acknowledge your classmate the first fully Romulan cadet at Starfleet Academy: Elnor. May you all go boldly into a future freed from the shackles of the past."

"It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it."

"Time is always moving on; nothing can stop it. We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future. The more compassionate you are, the more you will find inner peace."

"I know when I was a kid, I used to look at these pictures and listen to the songs of the Gay Nineties, and I used to say to my mother, 'Oh, I wish I had lived then; it was so gay and so wonderful.' [...] Now [the Jazz Age] seems very mysterious and wonderful to you, kids, and when you have kids, they'll say, 'Gee, Dad, those 50's, they were something.' [...] I really think it goes in cycles. When your kids come in and say 'Gee, Dad, I wish we had done that,' and so on and so forth, it's the same thing. I don't think it's changed a great deal."

"There's no need to reminisce about the past; obviously because that shit did not last."

"I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present."

"I think we agree, the past is over."

"Peter Burke asks, “What is the function of social memory?” He speculates that if a lawyer were asked, “[H]e or she might well discuss the importance of custom and precedent, the justification or legitimation of actions in the present with reference to the past.”"

"How we remember the past determines the shape of the future."

"You shouldn't chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind."

"Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future."

"You can never plan the future by the past."

"One does not love the past in its living truth if he insists on preserving its hardened and mummified forms. The past is an appeal; it is an appeal toward the future which sometimes can save it only by destroying it. Even though this destruction may be a sacrifice, it would be a lie to deny it: since man wants there to be being, he can not renounce any form of being without regret. But a genuine ethics does not teach us either to sacrifice it or deny it: we must assume it."

"Not heaven itself upon the past has power; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour."

"Historians are really great at predicting the past. But the future is for prophets, and the track records of most prophets is dismal."

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

"A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future."

"I am wading in the ruins of was."

"Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future."

"At the beginning of the new millennium, and at the close of the Great Jubilee during which we celebrated the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus and a new stage of the Church's journey begins, our hearts ring out with the words of Jesus when one day, after speaking to the crowds from Simon's boat, he invited the Apostle to "put out into the deep" for a catch: "Duc in altum" (Lk 5:4). Peter and his first companions trusted Christ's words, and cast the nets. "When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish" (Lk 5:6). Duc in altum! These words ring out for us today, and they invite us to remember the past with gratitude, to live the present with enthusiasm and to look forward to the future with confidence: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever" (Heb 13:8)."

"Here our interest is directed to the temporal dimension of legality, the way law stands in relation to the past, the present, and the future. Law in the modern era is, we believe, one of the most important of our society’s technologies for preserving memory. Just as the use of precedent to legitimate legal decisions fixes law in a particular relation to the past, memory may be attached, or attach itself, to law and be preserved in and through law. Where this is the case, it serves as one way of orienting ourselves to the future. As Drucilla Cornell puts it: “Legal interpretation demands that we remember the future.” In that phrase, Cornell reminds us that there are, in fact, two audiences for every legal act, the audience of the present and the audience of the future. Law materializes memory in documents, transcripts, written opinions; it reenacts the past, both intentionally and unconsciously, and it is one place where the present speaks to the future through acts of commemoration."

"Because the litigated case creates a record, courts can become archives in which that record serves as the materialization of memory. Due process guarantees an opportunity to be heard by, and an opportunity to speak to, the future. It is the guarantee that legal institutions can be turned into museums of unnecessary, unjust, undeserved pain and death. The legal hearing provides lawyers and litigants an opportunity to write and record history by creating narratives of present injustices, and to insist on memory in the face of denial. By recording such history and constructing such narratives lawyers and litigants call on an imagined future to choose Justice over the “jurispathic” tendencies of the moment."

"Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past — let us accept our own responsibility for the future."

"My call is not to those who believe they belong to the past. My call is to those who believe in the future."

"If we dwell on real or imagined sins of the past, we shall never be able to find one another in the present, nor shall we be able to work together on building the future."

"Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ. Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him."