In the past, people were born royal. Nowadays, royalty comes from what you do.
In the past, a great library was the result of librarians functioning as guardians of culture, tending and caring, selecting and recommending works that maintained and nurtured a cultural heritage.
In the past, on Earth, it has largely been to exploit foreign resources and to expand the domestic territory.
One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.
The traditional divide between left and right, capital and labor, small state and big state, high taxes and low taxes doesn't define politics in the way it did in the past.
You can always affect things - so can you change it in a way that will make you as happy with it in the future as you were in the past? Maybe it won't be the same, but it might be something else you also like.
The nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices, which make decisions on the basis of decisions they made in the past.
Technology has saved us money in some circumstances, but it has really afforded us the ability to cover stories from locations we might not have been able to in the past.
You try to avoid the mistakes you made in the past.
I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past, but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.
There are significant human rights abuses in China. In some areas, the situation is worse today than in the past. In other areas, there have been improvements. We will recognize the latter, and be critical of the former.
I found with this record I had to really be strong-willed, because in the past I've tended to tinker and add a thing or take a thing away, and nearly always been wrong.
I've often said in the past that I thought MTV was sort of evil incarnate and signified the beginning of the end. And I don't know if I'm entirely wrong about that, but they did sign my paychecks a year ago, so I guess I'm part of the problem.
'Soulfire' is a collection of stuff I've done in the past. Each song is an element of who I am: There's a doo-wop song on the album; a blues song, R&B and some jazz. For people who are going to be hearing me for the first time, it's an introduction to who I am.
In the past, people worked together only when some great disaster threatened.
What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.
We do not have the luxury of two big oceans protecting us as we have had in the past, for we now have a new kind of enemy who deals with stealthiness. Our ability to protect ourselves is having the information ahead of time so we can thwart the attack.
I have in the past overly trusted people and was, in turn, let down by some. Since then, I have learned the difference between putting faith into people and blindly trusting them.
Every time I've talked about my family in the past, people have ended up getting upset. So I said to my friends and family: 'I shan't refer to you at all, and there's nothing for you to get upset about. There's the deal.'
In the past 40 years, the United States lost more than a million farmers and ranchers. Many of our farmers are aging. Today, only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming, and more and more of our farmers are looking elsewhere for their primary source of income.
You can't live in the past, there's nothing you can do about it.
I don't have nothing to regret at all in the past, except that I might've unintentionally hurt somebody else or something.
It costs so much to promote something these days that almost always safety is the preferred option, reference back to things which have been successful in the past. Also, people are simply not given the time to develop and find themselves and their audience as we were.
Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.
In the past, I've thrown myself into work so much there's been very little room for anything else.
I'll demand of myself and my own government what, in the past, I insisted of others.
Today, no less than in the past, the tetrahedral form of the earth and the relation of the tetrahedron to the poles and to the equator preserve the conditions that favor rapid evolution.
I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there.
We have to look forward and keep filming new films and not get stuck in the past.
Along with racial equality and the late bloom of women's rights, future generations will have to explain how, in the past, gays were misunderstood and publicly humiliated for loving each other, and, eventually, how they stood together and conquered stupidity and hypocritical hatred, and fought their way out of marginalization.
To be old is to be part of a huge and ordinary multitude... the reason why old age was venerated in the past was because it was extraordinary.
I noticed in the past, a lot of guys who like strong women, they really freak out if you're not strong 24/7. Or they complain about you being strong, then the moment you're not strong, they're like, 'Oh, no, no, no.'
One of the tragedies of modern times is that people have come to believe that something said by someone in the past, perhaps for illustrative or provocation purposes, actually represents that person's beliefs at the time.
I'm sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control.
In the past when I was in Hollywood, I was like a dog. I felt humiliated. My English was not good. People would even ask me 'Jackie Who?'.
In the past, I had workaholic issues.
