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

Necessity… the mother of invention.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

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

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.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

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.

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

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge – the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.

Better a broken promise than none at all.

What is past is prologue.

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

One word from the Lord is like a piece of gold to a believer, who is like a jeweler, shaping and hammering out the promise for a number of weeks.

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.

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we’re going forward to tomorrow or whether we’re going to go past to the – to the back!

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

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.

In the good old days when I was a senator, I was my own man.

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.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.

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

I love my friends and my past, and it’s made me who I am.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the 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.

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

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

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

Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

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

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

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.

A promise must never be broken.

One’s past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

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

The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.

They say miracles are past.

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

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

I was adored once too.

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

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

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.

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