A Quote by Lawrence Lessig
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.
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So many dictators trying to blackmail the free world because they have no way to compete on ideas, innovation or creativity. The Cold War was two competing visions of the future. I was always anti-communist but it was an idea at least, an alternative idea. We do not have a competing vision for the future because the ideals of these dictators are in the past. They are time travellers. They need confrontation and destruction to survive. The problem is, many people in the free world are sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.
The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future. The cutting edge of the instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.
The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The Past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend. In the Past is no hope; The Future is both hope and fruition. The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.
Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.
A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture" -- a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.
Carrying the past in to the present, we program the future to continue the past. Letting go the past in the present, we free the future to be something else.
Investors covet past improvements but also always believe pricing unimaginable future creativity and efficiency gains is Pollyannaish. And they're always wrong. Bet on it.
There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.
Creativity is the power to reject the past, to change the status quo, and to seek new potential. Simply put, aside from using one's imagination - perhaps more importantly - creativity is the power to act.
How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.
Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.
As far as me, I'm just looking forward to the future. There's a lot of people that look to the past. I've learned from the past, absolutely. I know my past absolutely. I'm not discrediting or... ignoring my past in any way, but my focus has always been moving forward, moving forward into the future.
We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use to the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It's always new.
We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us.
The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.
As time goes on we become old, the future contracts, the past expands...But by future we don't just mean the years ahead; we always mean as well the plenitude of possibilities which challenge our creativity...In confrontation with the future we can become young if we accept the future's challenges.
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