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Walter Ong

In The Human Grain

"Time is beyond all persuasion. It hears no pleas. This inexorability of time tempts man into illusion: he likes to think that time is cyclic, that it will return either to give him another chance or to show that he never had a chance at all -- what happens happens because it had happened before, so that he has no responsibility. But this pretense is unreal, and it reveals itself more and more as unreal since the discovery of evolution, which is the discovery of the unrepeatability of all being."