Time & Perspective Quote by Finley Peter Dunne

Nostalgia is less a memory than a makeover, and Dunne skewers it with a journalist's eye for the con. "The past always looks better than it was" reads like a blunt newsroom corrective to sentimental mythmaking: history gets airbrushed because we want it to. The follow-up is the knife twist: "It's only pleasant because it isn't here". The past feels safe precisely because it can't argue back, demand rent, or expose the gaps in our self-story. Absent consequences, we can curate it into a highlight reel.

Dunne, best known for his Mr. Dooley columns, wrote in an era when America was rapidly remaking itself: industrialization, immigration, labor conflict, urban political machines. In that churn, the temptation to romanticize "simpler times" wasn't just personal; it was political. Idealized yesterdays become a rhetorical tool to scold the present, to police change, to justify who belongs and who doesn't. Dunne's line punctures that move by implying the past isn't inherently better - it's just conveniently unavailable.

The quote also nails a psychological trick: distance does editing. Pain dulls, boredom disappears, the everyday irritations that actually constituted life get dropped from the narrative. What remains is mood, not fact. Dunne isn't asking us to hate history; he's warning that nostalgia can be a kind of laziness, a refusal to do the harder work of living in the now, with all its mess, agency, and accountability.