The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

- Albert Einstein

I write songs about stuff that I can't really get past personally - and then I write a song about it and I feel better.

- Amy Winehouse

I think I'm past the age of getting lost.

- Amanda Seyfried

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking to any leader - or any person - in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks.

- Alice Walker

When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.

- Alexis de Tocqueville

Youth culture now really looks back and embraces the past, but keeps it contemporary but not sticking to one particular style.

- Alexander McQueen

Winners live in the present tense. People who come up short are consumed with future or past. I want to be living in the now.

- Alex Rodriguez

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

- Alex Haley

I don't regret any past. I am not there. I am not sorry not to make pictures, because I know one day I will do it. I intend to live 150 years.

- Alejandro Jodorowsky

Yes, I am a Mexican, and I have a past and a culture. But what matters is the film itself, not where it was financed or cast.

- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

- Abraham Lincoln

In the past, I had workaholic issues.

- Alanis Morissette

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

- Alan Watts

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally... Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.

- Al Gore

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

- Adrienne Rich

I would love it if we made more comparisons between current issues and issues of the past. Maybe we'd realize that sometimes 'current issues' and 'past issues' are one and the same. Our world's people still fight over natural resources, kill in the name of religion, occupy regions and give them up - just as we did 'so long ago.'

- Adora Svitak

It seems we're not only uninformed about our present, we're ignorant of our past.

- Adora Svitak

You know how in every heist movie they get past the security cameras that show the hallway leading to the diamonds by jamming the screens with a fake signal of everything looking safe and quiet? Usually a guard coughs so they don't notice the blip from switching to the bogus feed.

- Adam McKay

Other than Green Day, we haven't had a lot of protest music over the past few decades.

- Adam McKay

In the past, in the '60s and '70s, genres were much more segmented. You had action guys who were deadly serious about it, and I think you had comics that were comics.

- Adam McKay