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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Past Quotes

We did major work at the White House. But what people often don’t understand is that when you do a historic restoration, you can’t just do whatever you want. You work alongside the fine-arts commission and are obliged to create a replica of the past, as close as humanly possible. It’s a historic institution, not a showhouse.

– Iris Apfel

In some ways, you can think of end-to-end encryption as honoring what the past looked like.

– Jan Koum

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.

– John F. Kennedy

Every story about me is so heavy and dramatic. That’s not how I do life. But that’s the impression people have, and that’s what keeps getting reiterated. As if I’m still stuck in all the muck of the past. And I am so not.

– Halle Berry

At the same time, it’s a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.

– Jeffrey Eugenides

When I’m writing, I can always play around with tense. I can always make past present. I can always kind of manipulate, and I can always be delusional in a way that’s completely self-serving. With film, it’s like, the camera can’t really lie. It can manipulate to a certain extent.

– Jose Antonio Vargas

In a basic sense, ‘A Little Life’ is a homage to how my friends and I live our lives. I wanted to push past the definitions of how we typically define friendship. It’s a different version of adulthood, but it’s no less important and no less legitimate than anyone else’s.

– Hanya Yanagihara

In the past when I was in Hollywood, I was like a dog. I felt humiliated. My English was not good. People would even ask me ‘Jackie Who?’.

– Jackie Chan

The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.

– Jean Piaget

Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.

– Jean de la Bruyere

I just don’t like to talk about the past.

– Jochen Zeitz

I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.

– Jim Crace

If you haven’t gotten a raise in the past couple years for a job well done, it might be time to ask for one.

– Jean Chatzky

Peace, so elusive in the past many decades, now finally prevails all over the country.

– Hun Sen

I’ve never been nostalgic, personally or politically – if the past was so great, how come it’s history?

– Julie Burchill

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.

– John Updike

I like reading about the past. I’m definitely not a history buff, but I do read a bit of history now and again, and to do that for work is really exciting.

– James McAvoy

Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it, the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.

– James Salter

I felt my mother about the place. I don’t think she haunts me, but I wouldn’t put it past her.

– Julie Walters

The lessons of the past should steer us towards ensuring lasting legacies for generations yet to be born.

– Hun Sen

Even in Britain, the trade unions tell me that employment contracts have less protection than in the past.

– Jacques Delors

There is an opportunity for us to renew ourselves. There’s an opportunity for us to leave the past behind and present something different for the future.

– Jay Weatherill

Vinyl is the real deal. I’ve always felt like, until you buy the vinyl record, you don’t really own the album. And it’s not just me or a little pet thing or some kind of retro romantic thing from the past. It is still alive.

– Jack White

The fact that a crime might have been committed with impunity in the past may make it seem more familiar and less gruesome, but surely does not give it any greater legitimacy.

– Jonathan Kozol

I would rather be an independent senator, governed by my own views, going for the good of the country, uncontrolled by any thing which mortal man can bring to bear upon me, than to be president of the United States, put there as presidents of the United States have been for many years past.

– John C. Calhoun

You know, you have a lot of people – I’ve met a lot of people in the past, I’ve gone to private schools, you know, encountered different people who think that it’s OK to make comments, insensitive comments about your race because they’re joking. And think that if they’re joking and they say it, you know, good-naturedly, that things will fly.

– Issa Rae

Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.

– Jonathan Sacks

There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.

– Jean Rostand

There are certain things in ‘Descender’ that I’ve dealt with in the past. I think you can see a direct parallel with Sweet Tooth in TIM-21.

– Jeff Lemire

The wind industry has made major strides over the past two decades, and they have proven their industry to be efficient and self-sustainable. There is no need for the taxpayer to continue to subsidize a wind start-up tax credit.

– James Lankford

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