Retroactive Quotes & Sayings

I am 100 percent confident. This is a security review that was requested. It is being carried out. It will be resolved. But I have to add if there's going to be a security review about me, there's going to have to be security reviews about a lot of other people, including Republican office holders, because we've got this absurd situation of retroactive classifications. — Hillary Clinton

It is futile to talk too much about the past ... like trying to make birth control retroactive. — Charles Erwin Wilson

An artistic image is one that ensures its own development, its historical viability. An image is a grain, a self-evolving retroactive organism. It is a symbol of actual life, as opposed to life itself. Life contains death. An image of life, by contrast, excludes it, or else sees in it a unique potential for the affirmation of life.
Whatever it expresses - even destruction and ruin - the artistic image is by definition an embodiment of hope, it is inspired by faith.
Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death. Therefore it is
optimistic, even if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic.
And so there can never be optimistic artists and pessimistic artists. There can only be talent and mediocrity. — Andrei Tarkovsky

A sort of insatiability seems to infect our feelings when we look back on women, particularly on those who are highly interesting and yet whose effort at self-definition through works is fitful, casual, that of an amateur. We are inclined to think they could have done more, that we can make retroactive demands upon them for a greater degree of independence and authenticity. — Elizabeth Hardwick

Congress passed the deeply flawed Patriot Act and authorized the invasion of Iraq. It even gave its retroactive approval to warrantless wiretapping. — Andrew Rosenthal

There is no straight line to Goodness, to Love, or to God. And thank God, Grace is always retroactive. — Richard Rohr

Writers begin changing the instant they append 'The End' to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even the novels themselves, through the strange transmutations of time and shifting tastes and mores, exhibit changes as we look backward upon them, acquiring retroactive meanings and tonalities. — Paul Di Filippo

[On being asked if she would favor birth control laws:] I will if you make it retroactive. — Florence Prag Kahn

Retroactive management emphasizes the bottom line. — W. Edwards Deming

I've come out many times publicly in support of the death penalty. I've stated that I'd be more than willing personally to pull the switch on some of the monsters I've hunted in my career with the FBI. But Bruno Hauptmann just doesn't fit into this category -- the evidence just wasn't, and isn't, there to have confidently sent him to the electric chair. To impose the one sentence for which there is no retroactive correction requires a far higher standard of proof than was seen here. Blaming him for the entire crime was, to my mind, an expedient and simpleminded solution to a private horror that had become a national obsession. — John E. Douglas

What you are talking about is retroactive classification. And the reason that happens is when somebody asks or when you are asked to make information public, I asked all my emails to be made public. Then all the rest of the government gets to weigh in. — Hillary Clinton

I saw School of Rock, and I was like, why haven't I worked with Richard Linklater already? Then by the time I got him I was like, I'm really pissed off I feel like you owe me some retroactive swag. He gave me the 10-year anniversary "Dazed and Confused" T-shirt, which I still wear with relish. — Robert Downey Jr.

I taught what was clear in Acts 11:26: SAVED = CHRISTIAN = DISCIPLE, simply meaning that you cannot be saved and you cannot be a true Christian without being a disciple also. I taught that, to be baptized, you must first make the decision to be a disciple, and then be baptized ... I taught that their baptism was invalid because a retroactive understanding of repentance and baptism was not consistent with Scripture. — Kip McKean

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect. — Ambrose Bierce

In coming to terms with the newly dead, I seem to have agitated the spirits of the long dead. They were stirring uneasily in their graves, demanding to be mourned as I had not mourned them when they were buried. I was plunged into retroactive grief for my father, and could no longer deny, though I still tried, the loss I'd suffered at the death of my mother ... Was it possible ... that one could mourn over losses that had occurred more than half a century earlier? — Eileen Simpson

Historia abscondita. - Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is placed in the balance again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places - into his sunshine. There is no way of telling what may yet become part of history. Perhaps the past remains essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still needed! — Friedrich Nietzsche

The company calls it 'downsizing' or 'rightsizing.' My own informal "Name the Layoff" contest produced some other euphemisms: Retroactive Hiring Freeze, Resume Revision Days, Amway Opportunity Time, and Corporation Lite. — Dale Dauten

Once you've been committed to a mental institution you're considered a second-rate citizen from then on and retroactive. — Mary Jane Ward

The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement. — Daniel Dennett

The only thing worse than an active conscience is one that's retroactive. — Harold Coffin

Among the women, a spontaneous cheer went up, which Liz was surprised to find herself joining, and this was when (she was on her fifth drink) she realized both that she was completely drunk
not just tipsy, not merely buzzed
and also that she was much happier than she'd been an hour or two before. She felt a retroactive remorse for all the Eligible contestants she'd deemed trashy and idiotic from the comfort of her living room; apparently, like teriyaki pizza and bee venom facials, getting wasted on a reality-TV show was not to be knocked until tried. — Curtis Sittenfeld

The great protagonists are those who fight for their ideas and ideals despite the fact that they receive no recognition at the hands of their contemporaries. They are the men whose memories will be enshrined in the hearts of the future generations. It seems then as if each individual felt it his duty to make retroactive atonement for the wrong which great men have suffered at the hands of their contemporaries. Their lives and their work are then studied with touching and grateful admiration. Especially in dark days of distress, such men have the power of healing broken hearts and elevating the despairing spirit of a people. — Adolf Hitler

Pannenberg's conception of retroactive continuity ultimately means that history flows fundamentally from the future into the past, that the future is not basically a product of the past. — E. Frank Tupper

You make me wish that birth control was retroactive. — Redd Foxx

Both Heaven and Hell are retroactive, all of one's life will eventually be known to have been one or the other. — Sheldon Vanauken