The good old days always seemed better in distant memory than they had actually been at the time.

Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?

"By and large Western culture is a celebration of the illusion that good may exist without evil, light without darkness, and pleasure without pain, and this is true of both its Christian and secular, technological phases. Here, or hereafter, our ideal is a world in which ''there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away."
To give credit where credit is due, it has been a grand illusion.

All of us,” he said, “are walking around with an illusion — an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” We tend to never learn this lesson.

We truly to think that the world doth even now be old; and this to have seemed a true thing unto every age that ever did live.

The belief that society was in decline was a permanent characteristic of every era. People always believed they lived in a crumbling world. They themselves were of course okay, but everyone around them was headed downhill.

As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.

Time is an illusion.

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the "fifties" or "sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.

We live in an age when there is a false glare on the things of time, and a great mist over the things of eternity.

Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousands truths