A Quote by Alfred Gough

We liked the idea that it was a low-tech future. But everything always repeats the past. If you look today and look at something in the middle east where you got people getting beheaded it's like the crusades with Twitter. It's crazy, human nature does the same thing. In a way, even though you're in the future people wanted order so this sort of system rose up.
People have always had this craving to have someone tell them the future. Long ago, kings would hire people to read sheep guts. There's always been a market for people who pretend to know the future. Listening to today's forecasters is just as crazy as when the king hired the guy to look at the sheep guts.
People in the East looked toward the West with longing. They would have liked to have the same comforts, the same goods, the same chances. They saw a system that demanded of them sacrifices with nothing but promises for the future.
I think part of the problem with charity is that it tends to make us view people as helpless victims. I think in the future, we'll look back on charity in the same way that we look back on colonialism today: as a very paternalistic system that doesn't fully recognise the full spectrum of humanity.
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.
People feel that the beauty of the Istanbul is something we used to have in the past or something we will have in the future. But we have that beauty today, too, in the mixture of past and future. We have to save it today and we have to enjoy it today.
Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.
The future is an unknown, but a somewhat predictable unknown. To look to the future we must first look back upon the past. That is where the seeds of the future were planted. I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
Even time is a concept. In reality we are always in the eternal present. The past is just a memory, the future just an image or thought. All our stories about past and future are only ideas, arising in the moment. Our modern culture is so tyrannized by goals, plans, and improvement schemes that we constantly live for the future. But as Aldous Huxley reminded us in his writings, "An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity...the idea of endless progress is the devil's work, even today demanding human sacrifice on an enormous scale.
But, it has something to do with having belief in a human future and what that human future is. What is the future of humanity? How does this whole experiment not self-destruct with the environment and everything else going on?
The future doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we're the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.
Does anyone believe for one moment that the progress we have made would have been possible under bureaucratic control of any government. This country was founded upon the principle of the regulation of private effort, of making rules for the game, and under that system alone can we look for the same success in the future which has been ours in the past. Our position today is the direct result of the free play among our people of private competitive effort.
I want women to really look like women from today. It's not from the past and not from the future, because I don't know what happens in the future. It is the woman of today (who) I think is a seductive woman.
People think just because I'm from the Middle East, I'm an expert on the Middle East. So, like, I got a friend, like, any time the gas prices go up, he'll always ask my opinion about it.
My idea was you can't dress for the stage, you have to dress all the time like you're onstage. And so I would just always wear suits or some form of it. I wanted people to know I played music. That was kind of how you would find other people: you would just walk around looking a certain way and end up meeting someone who liked the way you look.
Even the mistakes, even everything bad that happened, I wouldn’t change because then I wouldn’t be the person that I am today. The past is the past. I just want to focus on the future, and getting better, not making the same mistakes and just becoming a better person, a better artist. Just a better everything.
The past is a rich resource on which we can draw in order to make decisions for the future, but it does not dictate our choices. We should look back at the past and select what is good, and leave behind what is bad.
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