Recent Past Quotes

• There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.

  George Carlin

  Funny, Future, Humor

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• Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Memories, Healing

  "Healing by Degrees" by Jean-Paul Bedard, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 1, 2014.

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• The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union - who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn't always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Art, Past, Egypt

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change. The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year [2011] can each be attributed to climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.

  James Hansen

  Morning, Jobs, Past

  "NASA scientist links climate change, extreme weather", www.cnn.com. August 6, 2012.

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• The biggest mistake investors make is to believe that what happened in the recent past is likely to persist. They assume that something that was a good investment in the recent past is still a good investment. Typically, high past returns simply imply that an asset has become more expensive and is a poorer, not better, investment.

  Ray Dalio

  Mistake, Believe, Past

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• The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Past, Mirrors, Views

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• A truly global economy, as opposed to the multinational economy of the recent past, will require concessions of national power ... that seemed impossible a few years ago and which even now we can but partly imagine.

  Walter Wriston

  Past, Years, Impossible

  Walter B. Wriston (1992). “The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our World”, Scribner

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• The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Philosophy, Past, Preparation

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• Every day grows more amnesiac about its recent past.

  Hilton Kramer

  Past, History, Grows

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• [talking about the Holocaust] 'But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.' 'But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be... even on the Holocaust.

  Alan Bennett

  Jobs, Distance, Mean

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• I like to think of myself as a reasonable man. But I have buried too many friends in the too-recent past, and I have seen too many lies go unquestioned, and too many questions go unasked. There is a time when even reasonable men must begin to take unreasonable actions. To do anything else is to be less than human.

  Mira Grant

  Lying, Past, Men

  "Deadline: The Newsflesh Trilogy".

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• The advances of biology during the past 20 years have been breathtaking, particularly in cracking the mystery of heredity. Nevertheless, the greatest and most difficult problems still lie ahead. The discoveries of the 1970's about the chemical roots of memory in nerve cells or the basis of learning, about the complex behavior of man and animals, the nature of growth, development, disease and aging will be at least as fundamental and spectacular as those of the recent past.

  H. Bentley Glass

  Memories, Lying, Learning

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• [Our goal] is to help revive America's traditional values: faith, family, neighborhood, work and freedom. Government has no business enforcing these values but neither must it seek, as it did in the recent past, to suppress or replace them. That only robbed us of our tiller and set us adrift. Helping to restore these values will bring new strength, direction and dignity to our lives and to the life of our nation. It's on these values that we'll best build our future.

  Ronald Reagan

  Past, Government, America

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• Today it is not a matter of ‘conserving’ the present or returning to a recent past that has failed, but rather of regaining possession of our most archaic roots, which is to say those most suited to the victorious life.

  Guillaume Faye

  Past, Roots, Matter

  Guillaume Faye (2010). “Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-catastrophic Age”, p.14, Arktos

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• I'm not a historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

  Penelope Lively

  Science, Past, Aspect

  "I'm not a historian but I can get obsessively interested in the past". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. August 26, 2001.

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• I felt like, in the recent past, people have been apologizing for Superman, a little bit, for his costume, for his origins, and for the way he fits into society.

  Zack Snyder

  Past, People, Littles

  Source: collider.com

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• If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.

  Terry Eagleton

  Moving, Writing, Past

  Terry Eagleton (2008). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.190, U of Minnesota Press

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• I found my way to make my peace with the recent past by turning it into WORD.

  Charles Bartlett Johnson

  Past, Way, Found

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• There's nothing in the recent past I want to write about.

  Sinead O'Connor

  Writing, Past, Want

  "Sinéad O'Connor: 'I define success differently'" by Caroline Sullivan, www.theguardian.com. March 1, 2012.

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• I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God.

  G. Willow Wilson

  Past, Hands, Hygiene

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• The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past.

  C. S. Lewis

  Past, Knowing

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “Selected Literary Essays”, p.12, Cambridge University Press

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• Have you heard a single national figure tell you all of the crises of the recent past are not economic, they're cultural?

  Newt Gingrich

  Past, Economic, Figures

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• When I say I hate nostalgia, I hate things set in the recent past where everything is shiny and new.

  Chris O'Dowd

  Hate, Past, Nostalgia

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colors are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little-understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colors always smell slightly of boiled cabbage—even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.

  Terry Pratchett

  Fun, Past, Color

  Terry Pratchett (2012). “The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld”, p.24, Harper Collins

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• I MAY HAVE ALLOWED MYSELF SOME FLICKER OF EMOTION IN THE RECENT PAST, said Death, BUT I CAN GIVE IT UP ANY TIME I LIKE.

  Terry Pratchett

  Past, Giving, May

  Terry Pratchett (2009). “Soul Music: (Discworld Novel 16)”, p.175, Random House

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