"Those who look to the past instead of the future have a full view, at any rate, which is more than can be said for even the most gifted purported searchers into the future. If the past produces tiresome nostalgics, these are less a plague at the present time than are 'futurists' or 'futurologists.' Properly worked, the past is, as all comparative historians from Herodotus on have said, a vast and wonderful laboratory for the study of successes and failures in the long history of man. If we have to look beyond the present, and apparently most of us do, the past is terra firma by comparison with anything even the most fertile imagination--armed with the most powerful of computers--can come up with out of the liberal's cherished future."
--Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality, 1986