In campaigns, promises are usually treated skeptically. Past positions are viewed as the one reliable way to gauge a candidate's instincts.
As long as 'Pearl Harbor' stays in the past, it's perfect; when it wretchedly changes gears in the late going, it becomes the wrong kind of same old story: Hollywood stupidity and callowness, writ large across the sky.
The Gen X generation never got past 'Reality Bites,' apparently, and my generation, the Gen Yers... Facebook? Maybe a conservative revolution?
Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then.
Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.
In past generations, people would try to play younger than they really are. My trick is, I don't try to play younger than I really am.
The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.
What part of 9/11 is big? If the future continues to reinterpret the past, it could be argued that 9/11 provides irrefutable proof that unless there is some other way that we learn to deal with our technology or deal with our brothers and sisters, it is goodbye as a species. That genie does not leave that bottle.
One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.
The deciphering of ancient scripts changed forever the way Europeans were able to imagine the story of humanity, destroying centuries of received authority about the past with repercussions as important for our understanding of time and history as the geological studies of the same period.
The Ozarks are old and worn mountains from the geological past.
There's been periods of broadcasts in the past where you could see all ages of entertainers, ranging from George Burns to Shirley Temple. That's not the condition now.
For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future - a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined.
Charity fundraisers are nothing new to me. In the past, I have taken part in ski races for hospitals, walks for breast cancer, and long distance bike rides for geriatric care.
For me, the 'Three Stoppages' was a first gesture liberating me from the past.
I do still get shocked every once in a while when I catch my reflection when I'm walking past a glass building, but it's in my mind about getting older and finding out what I'm going to look like as it unfolds - or as it folds, depending on where the marks and scars land.
I'm involved in quite a few ministries as a bridge builder, trying to match generous givers and donors to other ministries. Based on my past, I'm also involved in mainly the prison ministry. I go to jails and prisons and share my story, trying to give them some hope.
I don't believe in past lifetimes, but if there was one, I had to be a gladiator.
Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?
The flight crew for the orbital mission has been picked, and I'm not on it. Of course I've been feeling pretty low for the past few days. All of us are mad because Glenn was picked.
