Time & Perspective Quote by Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

A Victorian politician’s attempt to make moral reckoning sound like forward motion. Bulwer-Lytton opens with a hard stop - "What is past is past" - the kind of brisk phrase that pretends to shut the courtroom door on old scandals while quietly keeping the file open. It’s not amnesia; it’s triage. The past can’t be rewritten, so the only politically useful question is whether the guilty (or merely compromised) can be made serviceable again.

The sentence then pivots to a conditional mercy: "there is a future left to all men" - all men, notably, not all people. This is a public-life doctrine as much as a private one: a society that offers no route back from disgrace breeds either cynicism or rebellion. But Bulwer-Lytton doesn’t give redemption away. He puts it behind two gates that flatter the speaker’s moral authority: "virtue to repent" and "energy to atone". Repentance isn’t framed as emotion or regret; it’s "virtue", a character credential. Atonement isn’t prayer; it’s "energy", a kind of moral labor. That pairing is strategic: it turns forgiveness from a gift into a performance standard.

The subtext is disciplinarian optimism. Yes, people can change - but only in ways that restore social order and reassure observers that justice has been respected. In a 19th-century Britain fixated on respectability, reform, and the management of public sin, the line functions like a rehabilitation policy: the future is available, but only to those willing to pay for it in visible work.