A Quote by Martin Luther King, Jr.

[W]e are the heirs of a past of rope, fire, and murder. I for one am not ashamed of this past. My shame is for those who became so inhuman that they could inflict this torture upon us.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Quote Topics

Am Ashamed Became Could Fire Heirs Inflict Inhuman Murder Past Rope Shame Those Torture Us

Quote Author

Martin Luther King, Jr.
American - Leader
January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968

But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past - or more accurately, pastness - is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

I am not ashamed of my past. I am not ashamed of my humble beginning.

Madam C. J. Walker

I am not ashamed of my past; I am not ashamed of my humble beginnings.

Madam C. J. Walker

There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.

John F. Kennedy

We want to go in for suffering, and there may be torture. If we put the women in front the Government may hesitate to inflict on us all the penalty that they might otherwise inflict.

Mahatma Gandhi

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

Jorge Luis Borges

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

William Ellery Channing

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.

George Steiner

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.

Herman Melville

I believe we all have lists of shame. Long lists. We live with our constellation of shames quite privately. But they weigh us down. I wish I could abracadabra away shame. This is such a waste of our small time on earth. Our bodies are often the focus of shame. The shame of the body changing. Of the sexual body. Of the aging body. Not being able to do what you once could do. Even just looking at your skin as you age, the texture, the wrinkle, the sag, and somehow feeling ashamed and responsible for its changes.

Victoria Redel

One of the keys to learning for me has been to not get so hung up on the past. It's important to remember the past, but that doesn't mean you have to torture yourself with it by reliving it every single day.

Georges St-Pierre

Where the mind is past hope, the heart is past shame.

John Lyly

While I honor the soldiers in my family, and I am a student of history, the past is the past, and I do not live in the past.

Robert Wilkie

But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?

Alan Lightman

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.