My first attempts to transmit typhus to laboratory animals, including the smaller species of monkeys, had failed, as had those of my predecessors, for reasons which I can easily supply today
We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes, and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.
To equal a predecessor, one must have twice they worth.
Unrestrained automobility, hedonism, individualism, and conspicuous consumption cannot be sustained because they take more than they give back. A spiritually impoverished world cannot be sustained because meaninglessness, anomie, and despair will corrode the desire to be sustained and the belief that humanity is worth sustaining. But these are the very things that distinguish the modern age from its predecessors, Genuine sustainability, in other words, will come not from superficial changes but from a deeper process akin to humankind growing up to a fuller stature.
I have extremely friendly feelings for German chancellor. I think Angela Merkel is very courageous, and that is one reason I have such great respect for her. But I also know that she has now survived French presidents for 12 years. I am constantly trying to imagine all the mistakes my predecessors made and to avoid repeating them.
OBSERVATORY, n. A place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of their predecessors.
Baseball's time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers' youth, and even back then. . . there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped.
Perhaps I am following in the footsteps of François Mitterrand, who really did want to shape Europe. My predecessors, by contrast, thought it was best to say nothing at all and to keep all their options open. That may sound like a tactical approach, but perhaps it was simply because they didn't have any ideas for Europe at all.
New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.
In 2003, Congress should have resisted the rush to a war of choice with Iraq. I will do everything in my power to prevent us from repeating the mistakes of my predecessors.
I used to say I never talk about my successor, neither about my predecessor.
My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled.
Young Americans today are no more learned or skilful than their predecessors, no more knowledgeable, fluent, up-to-date, or inquisitive, except in the materials of youth culture.
The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
As for the United States' future in Afghanistan, it will be fire and hell and total defeat, God willing, as it was for their predecessors - the Soviets and, before them, the British.
We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.
Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
The prosperity which now prevails is without parallel in our history. Fruitful seasons have done much to secure it, but they have not done all. The preservation of the public credit and the resumption of specie payments, so successfully attained by the Administration of my predecessors, have enabled our people to secure the blessings which the seasons brought.
