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

Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.

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

Some day, following the example of the United States of America, there will be a United States of Europe.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

It’s hard to speculate what tomorrow may bring.

My one big regret is that I didn’t play on for ten more years.

Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us thru that darkness to a safe and sane future.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited – that has music and rhythm and time.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

That is America. That is America. Those bonds of affection; that common creed. We don’t fear the future; we shape it. We embrace it, as one people, stronger together than we are on our own.

Everywhere I go I find that people… both leaders and individuals… are asking one basic question, ‚Is there any hope for the future?‘ My answer is the same, ‚Yes, through Jesus Christ.‘

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

I don’t think that the total creation took place in six days as we now measure time. If we can confirm, say, the Big Bang theory, that doesn’t at all cause me to question my faith that God created the Big Bang.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

People look to time in expectation that it will eventually make them happy, but you cannot find true happiness by looking toward the future.

The only definition by which America’s best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.

Men who think that a woman’s past love affairs lessen her love for them are usually stupid and weak.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

I think 9/11 affected everybody in one way or another.

Therefore I am sure that this, my Coronation, is not the symbol of a power and a splendor that are gone but a declaration of our hopes for the future, and for the years I may, by God’s Grace and Mercy, be given to reign and serve you as your Queen.

The universe can take quite a while to deliver.

The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

I wear a hat on stage so that people won’t be blinded by the reflection from my head. Also, if I don’t wear a hat, there’s no way that the hat can be at that level by itself on the stage.

My grandfather was smart and had a whole lot of pride. He didn’t speak a terrible amount, but you could tell there was a ton on his mind – like a quiet acceptance of how life had turned out.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

You do indeed have a past, but not now! And, yes, you have a future, but not now! You can consume your now with thoughts of ‚then‘ and ‚maybe,‘ but that will keep you from the inner peace you could experience.

When we look back on all the perils through which we have passed and at the mighty foes that we have laid low and all the dark and deadly designs that we have frustrated, why should we fear for our future? We have come safely through the worst.

A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children and, if necessary, bone by bone.

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Our minds work in real time, which begins at the Big Bang and will end, if there is a Big Crunch – which seems unlikely, now, from the latest data showing accelerating expansion. Consciousness would come to an end at a singularity.

While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.

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.

In order for us to have a future that’s exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we’re a space-bearing civilization.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

You don’t have the same mentality as you did five years ago – even one year. People are always changing, and I believe that everyone deserves the space to change and for people to recognize their change.

I wanted in my lifetime to vote for a radical Native American woman, since my vision of any future that we might have is that it will be led by women and older women.

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

After 2014, we will support a unified Afghanistan as it takes responsibility for its own future.

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.