One of the tragedies of modern times is that people have come to believe that something said by someone in the past, perhaps for illustrative or provocation purposes, actually represents that person's beliefs at the time.
Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order.
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.
I think that as my kids grow up and hit milestones that spark emotion for myself in my own history, it will always trigger personal feelings from those times - whether good or bad - and I definitely want to develop the tools I need to keep the immediacy of those negative emotions in the past.
I think Twitter is such a cool thing because it really is a direct line to the fans and for fans back to you, and it's such a new thing. I think in the past there's been usually fan mail and that's really good, but Twitter, it gets an immediate response.
The process of facing and selecting our possessions can be quite painful. It forces us to confront our imperfections and inadequacies and the foolish choices we made in the past.
We want to overthrow the imperial power not because it is Manchurian but because we want republicanism... We republican revolutionaries can never have the notion of becoming emperors after the revolution, like all the peasant rebels did in the past.
I have noticed, with much distress, the excessive wartime activity of the investigating bureaus of Congress and the administration, with their impertinent and indecent searching out of the private lives and the past political beliefs of individuals.
In the past, action to combat climate change was viewed largely as running counter to economic growth, with 'going green' implying a sacrifice of prosperity for the sake of the environment. Today, we know better.
Trump, of course, has been very wrong in the past about important issues such as President Barack Obama's place of birth and Mexican immigrants, but the Republican frontrunner is correct in saying that former Republican President George W. Bush did not keep the country safe during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.
Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.
Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.
Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.
I like to spend time in the past, with the things that have been important to me.
We can't look for greatness in the past.
I don't have nothing to regret at all in the past, except that I might've unintentionally hurt somebody else or something.
Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.
I've often said in the past that I thought MTV was sort of evil incarnate and signified the beginning of the end. And I don't know if I'm entirely wrong about that, but they did sign my paychecks a year ago, so I guess I'm part of the problem.
