One thing alone not even God can do,
To make undone whatever hath been done.

The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, trans. Robert Williams (1879), book 6, chapter 2, p. 154. See also R. W. Browne's translation (1850), Book VI, Chapter II: / Therefore Agathon rightly says: "Of this alone even God is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been". / Same idea in John Milton, Paradise Lost, 9. 926. Pindar, Olympia. 2. 17. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, 2. 5. 10. Aristotle attributed these words to Agathon, an Athenian tragic poet who lived in the latter half of the fifth century B.C. In his column, "Today and Tomorrow", Walter Lippmann attributed the same idea to George Santayana: "He might meditate on Santayana's saying that not even God can change the past". New York Herald Tribune (June 11, 1951), p. 17. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).