Nothing is a bigger waste of time than regretting the past and worrying about the future.

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

From time to time, there are moments when I feel that even the smallest experiences from the past can be applied to something greater in the future.

If you go around Colombia or Latin America, without doubt you will find that 80 per cent of the time, you're discussing the past and only 20 per cent about the future.

I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.

I've been bothered about time generally and our tripartite division of time into past, present, and future. I think I know what the past is, and I think I know what future is, but I'm really not comfortable with the notion of present.

Not only is the past of a person with no memory inaccessible; his ability to think about the future is imperilled. Time travel, then, is ultimately - and paradoxically - an exercise in remembering. And without that capacity it simply cannot exist.

It is this compulsion to look backwards at a time of crisis because one's got no idea of what lies ahead. There is a notion of security that somehow it must resemble the past. It's never going to. Just because we muddled through in the past doesn't mean we can automatically muddle through in the future.

The particular aspect of time that I'm interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don't remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can't turn an omelet into an egg.

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