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 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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

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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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• 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 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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