There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.
Our line of business structure has served us very well in the past, when customer segments and product requirements were very distinct.
Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.
For those who support same-sex marriage - and I support it without reservation - the ideal of equality and the belief in the dignity of same-sex relationships necessarily makes the issue seem a great deal like the civil-rights struggles of the past.
One of the most interesting social trends of the past 20 years is the rise of residential segregation. So rich are living with rich and poor are living with poor.
New Year's resolutions often fail because toxic emotions and experiences from our past can sabotage us or keep us stuck with the same old thoughts, patterns and regrets.
There is a recurring temptation for any nation, and for any writer who operates within its field of force, to make an ornament of the past: to turn the losses to victories and to restate humiliations as triumphs.
The future or the past - It's very simple: building the future, or a restoration of post-communism.
In the past, the U.S. has shown its capacity to reinvent its gifts for leadership. During the 1970s, in the aftermath of the Nixon abdication and the Ford and Carter presidencies, the whole nation peered into the abyss, was horrified by what it saw and elected Ronald Reagan as president, which began a national resurgence.
People are really surprised by the fact that I keep in touch with the latest trends rather than retreating to the distant past.
In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.
When you get together with childhood friends, for example, there's an intimacy that you instantly have because you share something really profound in your past. There's a shortcut to emotional intimacy if you share your past with somebody. It's really empowering when you're reunited with people who share that.
A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: its memories are no less revealing than its aims.
You can't allow tradition to get in the way of innovation. There's a need to respect the past, but it's a mistake to revere your past.
We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments than about those who are being reassessed.
Never revisit the past, that's dangerous. You know, move on.
What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now.
To me, the only good reason to be touring is if you still have something good to share instead of just revisiting past glories.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.
I've been rewritten on past projects and thought, 'That's not what she was - she was this really powerful woman, and there's nothing wrong with that.' I'm going to keep writing them, and hopefully people will start making them.
