How we cite our quotes: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph.)
Quote #7
"Uther," [Merlyn] said at length, "your lamented father, is an aggressor. So were his predecessors the Saxons, who drove the Old Ones away. But if we go on living backward like that, we shall never come to the end of it. The Old Ones themselves were aggressors, against the earlier race of the copper hatchets, and even the hatchet fellows were aggressors, against some earlier crew of esquimaux who lived on shells. You simply go on and on, until you get to Cain and Abel." (Q.3.50)
It's not surprising that Merlyn has important things to say about living in the past. He has literally lived in the future, and here he talks about a figurative sense of living backwards in time—dwelling on things that happened in the past but that cannot be changed. At some point, the cycle has to be broken, and we have to live in the present and forget about past wrongs.
Quote #8
"Very interesting," he said in a trembling voice. "Very interesting. There was just such a man when I was young—an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos." (Q.8.25)
This is, of course, a reference to Hitler. Because he has lived backwards through time, Merlyn can bring lessons from the future (his past) into Arthur's world. And here he's barely able to contain his anger at Kay's proposition to just impose your way of life on others if your way is better than theirs and they just won't listen.