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

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet. Cyril Connolly

What is past is prologue. Shakespeare

My future will not copy fair my past/On any leaf but Heaven’s. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The best of prophets of the future is the past. Byron

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Karl Marx

Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times. Gustave Flaubert

History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled. Reinhold Niebuhr

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to him in this respect that he tolerates their existence. Samuel Butler

In the want of positive instincts, he drifted into the mental indolence of history. Henry Adams

Great abilities are not requisite for an historian, for in historical composition all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. Samuel Johnson

A fair-minded man, when reading history, is occupied almost entirely with refuting it. Voltaire

The past, at least, is secure. Daniel Webster

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. James Baldwin