The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

The problem about the future is that it keeps turning into the present.

If the present tries to sit in judgment on the past, it will lose the future.

The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight - all their lives.

There is a danger of expecting the results of the future to be predicted from the past.

why distort a past that can no longer stand up for itself?

History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.

The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence.

the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.

Modern man fell into the trap of believing that everything can be explained, that reality is a simple affair which has only to be organized in order to be mastered.

You can destroy your now by worrying about tomorrow.