Home / Topics / Past Quotes

Past Quotes

Browse 13378 quotes about Past.

Past Quotes

“Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born.”

Source: The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“There is one key area in which Zuma has made no attempt at reconciliation whatsoever: criminal justice and security. The ministers of justice, defence, intelligence (now called "state security" in a throwback to both apartheid and the ANC's old Stalinist past), police and communications are all die-hard Zuma loyalists. Whatever their line functions, they will also play the role they have played so ably to date: keeping Zuma out of court - and making sure the state serves Zuma as it once did Mbeki.”

“The physical universe was created when Oneness became duality, and we can see this duality, this yin and yang, everywhere in the universe, in every atom, every action, and in every function of the human body. Yin and yang are manifest everywhere, except at the very center of being, the perfect point of balance, at that infinite moment where the future becomes the past.”

Humans Moments Body Action Past Spiritual Universe Perfect Balance Function Infinite Oneness Manifest Atoms Human Body Duality Yang Yin And Yang

Author:Robert Tisserand

“If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of engineering and physics for the past two centuries (and the foreseeable future).”

Ifs Wells Two Past Science Nature Natural Saws Century Function Assuming Physics Mathematical Engineering Equations Hammers Continuity Differential Equations

Book:The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward

Source: The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward

“This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from the other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principal.”

Knows Real Reality Seems Past Realizing Events Identity Function Arise Dependent Remarkable Paradox Principal Future Events

Book:All the King's Men

Source: All the King's Men

“Organisms [...] are directed and limited by their past. They must remain imperfect in their form and function, and to that extent unpredictable since they are not optimal machines. We cannot know their future with certainty, if only because a myriad of quirky functional shifts lie within the capacity of any feature, however well adapted to a present role.”

Ifs Knows Wells Past Form Lying Roles Capacity Machines Function Certainty Features Imperfect Organisms Unpredictable Adapted Quirky Optimal

Book:Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History

Source: Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History

“Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable.”

“Everything that's happening in our world is a function of what is going on inside of people. We are violent in our minds. We are violent with one another. We walk past one another in the street and don't even look nor make eye contact - don't speak. We can be outraged about the missiles and the planes. I'm more outraged that somebody will walk past me in the street and not look me in the face and say good morning.”

People World Mind Looks Eye Past Faces Speak Walks Morning Streets Happenings Function Violent Contact Planes Our World Missiles Outraged Eye Contact

Author:Iyanla Vanzant

“Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive - in the past, that was mixed up with other illustrative duties, but that was still its central function that has been liberated in the art called modern.”

Feels Mean Has Beens Art Stills Past Alive Modern Duty Art Is Function Communicate Liberated

Author:Antony Gormley