The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

We will keep the promise of Social Security by taking the responsible steps to strengthen it – not by turning it over to Wall Street.

Now, as a nation, we don’t promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That’s an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up.

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

We don’t thrive on military acts. We do them because we have to, and thank God we are efficient.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‚security,‘ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists – they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.

The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

When you go to an oasis, you go there to supply yourself with the vital things you are missing, things that you need.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

I have never used Auto-Tune in a live television performance, and I have never used Auto-Tune in any of my concerts. That is a promise.

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

Necessity dispenseth with decorum.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

My grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever.

The people who are absent are the ideal; those who are present seem to be quite commonplace.

There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust.

Once I knew only darkness and stillness… my life was without past or future… but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.

If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.

Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.

A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Over the years I’ve learned how to lock myself up in a prison of hope, knowing that God has nothing but His best planned for me. He promised me things concerning my ministry and my life.

The sadness of the women’s movement is that they don’t allow the necessity of love. See, I don’t personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.

They say miracles are past.

I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

The future is purchased by the present.

Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

And that means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.

I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we’ve struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

To hard necessity ones will and fancy must conform.

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.