A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.
New Year Quotes
Edmund Burke, in 1791, gave the most useful advice for the occasion: you can never plan the future by the past. The page is built from the pages on change, hope, the future and time, with Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Horace and Byron supplying most of the entries. It has no New Year collection behind it.
If you want something about resolutions, the Change page has better material. The famous line about a small group of citizens changing the world, credited to Margaret Mead, is marked disputed. Nobody has found where it comes from.
Most quoted on new year:
Change based on principle is progress. Constant change without principle becomes chaos.
Nothing is there to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now does always last.
If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!
It is the future that creates his present.
All is an interminable chain of longing.
Life is a jest; and all things show it. I thought so once; and now I know it.
Time's glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.