Recent Past Quotes

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

  George Carlin

  Funny, Future, Humor

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• [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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• I guess I can call myself a pragmatist with a conservative perspective. It would be hard for me to explain this, but I always take realities of today, lessons from the distant and recent past into consideration.

  Vladimir Putin

  Past, Reality, Perspective

  Source: www.profitmagazin.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Charles Bartlett Johnson

  Past, Way, Found

  3 Copy quote

• The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

  Theodor Adorno

  Past, Catastrophe, Ifs

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.49, Verso

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Science fiction is a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them.

  Ray Bradbury

  Writing, Reality, Past

  Source: www.raybradbury.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When you visualize the recent past, do you see it as being somewhere over on the left?

  George Carlin

  Past, Left

  George Carlin (1998). “Brain Droppings”, Hyperion

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's human nature to extrapolate the recent past into the future, but it's terrible that managements go along with this.

  Charlie Munger

  Past, Management, Human Nature

  12 Copy quote

• There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

  Don DeLillo

  Past, Talking, Fading

  Don DeLillo (2011). “Falling Man”, p.81, Pan Macmillan

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• I valued the experience of making the recordings, and I value the performances contained therein, and I value so much of what they can represent. I also think they're a terrific listening experience. Putting them out this way was a way of trying to maintain and nurture the relationship with the audience and also shine a light on the recent past, because we are so apt to be forgetful as human beings that there was such a thing as a recent past. These are some of the reasons for making this record.

  Will Oldham

  Past, Thinking, Light

  "Will Oldham’s Fourth Dimension". Interview With T. Cole Rachel, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 10, 2016.

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• The political awakening that is happening worldwide is a major challenge for America, because it means that the world is much more restless. It's stirring. It has aspirations which are not easily satisfied. And if America is to lead, it has to relate itself somehow to these new, lively, intense political aspirations, which make our age so different from even the recent past.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Mean, Past, America

  Source: www.nytimes.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the immediate postwar era, financial crises in advanced countries were rare events, and before 1970 did not happen at all. Since then they have occurred more often, and 2008 was the most damaging of them all to date. If we have moved back to a regime of regular financial crises - like the one we had from the 1870s to the 1930s - then our economic future will be very different from our recent past.

  Alan M. Taylor

  Country, Past, Rare Events

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  3 Copy quote

  Show source