“No Time Like the Past” quotes from The Twilight Zone (1959)

Rod Serling

Exit one Paul Driscoll, a creature of the twentieth century. He puts to a test a complicated theorum of space-time continuum, but he goes a step further--or tries to. Shortly, he will seek out three moments of the past in a desperate attempt to alter the present--one of the odd and fanciful functions in a shadowland known as the Twilight Zone.

[at dinner] ...So what are your world views, Driscoll?

I don't have any, Mr. Hanford.

Of course you do, man. We ALL do! Like all this nonsense about giving the Indians land. What we need are twenty General Custers and a hundred thousand men! What we should have done is swept across the prairie, destroying every redskin that stood before us. And then we should have planted the American flag deep, high, and proud!

I think the country is tired of fighting, Mr. Hanford. I think we were bled dry by the Indian Wars. I think anything we can accomplish peacefully, with treaties, we should...so long as it saves lives.

Now, I trust this pap isn't what you spoon-feed your students. Treaties, indeed! Peace, indeed! Why, the virility of a nation is in direct proportion to its military prowess. I live for the day when this country SWEEPS AWAY...

You some kind of a pacifist, Driscoll?

No, just some sick idiot who's seen too many boys die because of too many men who fight their battles at dining room tables...and who probably wouldn't last so long as twenty-five seconds in a REAL skirmish, if they WERE thrust into it.

I take offense at that remark, Mr. Driscoll!

And I take offense at armchair warriors like yourself...who clearly don't know what a shrapnel, or a bullet, or a saber wound feels like...who've never smelled death after three days on a sun-drenched battlefield...who've never seen the look on a man's face when he realizes he's lost a limb or two, and his blood is seeping out. Mr. Hanford, you have a great enthusiasm for planting flags deep, high, and proud. But you don't have a nodding acquaintance with what it's like for families to bury their sons in the same soil!

I'll not sit here and take talk like that!

Of course you won't. You'll return to your bank, and it'll be business as usual until dinner tomorrow night...when you'll deliver another of your tirades about building up nations founded on ever-growing cemeteries. Well, if this nation shares your views -- as I dread it just might -- then you're in for some gratifying times, Mr. Hanford. There'll be many graveyards to fill, both American and foreign, because this country will get virile as the devil. We'll show how red our blood is, because we'll spill it. And we'll show how red our fellow nations' blood is, because we'll spill that also. Not that it's probable you yourself will need to spill any; chances are you won't even be there to see what I speak of come to pass. I'm sure you pity yourself for those two likelihoods; I, on the other hand, envy you for them.

Rod Serling

Incident on a July afternoon, 1881. A man named Driscoll who came and went and, in the process, learned a simple lesson, perhaps best said by a poet named Lathbury, who wrote, 'Children of yesterday, heirs of tomorrow, what are you wearing? Labor and sorrow? Look to your looms again, faster and faster fly the great shuttles prepared by the master. Life's in the loom, room for it--room!' Tonight's tale of clocks and calendars--in the Twilight Zone.