Americans often have trouble enjoying the present moment.
I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.
There's nothing more exciting than to watch a story break and grow, and to be the first one to present it to the world.
Kerry is an adult - he thinks things through. He learns from the present as well as the past. To George Bush, thinking things through is for sissies.
Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into the body, diffuse around and interfere with things as best they can. At present, medicine is unable to heal anything.
The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.
America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
Hierarchy is is much reviled in the present day.
History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
The present system of protecting NHS patients was a bit of a shambles.
Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.
The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments' plans.
There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world.
It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.