David McCullough Quotes

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.

A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

The past could liberate or imprison - it creates a nation's character, provides the nourishment or the poison a people imbibe in their very marrow.

We have a national memory in this country of about 7 minutes.

A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.

A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation.

When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

No man surely has so short a memory as the American.

For a country is not merely a piece of earth; it is, above all, a compendium of social, cultural, and historical factors which begin to acquire sense and order through the process of writing.

A people without a history is like the wind over buffalo grass.

Happy is the nation without a history.

History is a novel whose author is the people.

No people can live in the past - not even in its own past. But if it no longer has a link with its history, it must of necessity perish. Persia, crowded with hardship and glory, ordeals and hopes. With the help of the Almighty, the lessons of the past constitute the best guide for the citizens of the future.

History is an instrument of the most genuine patriotic spirit

The collective memory of America is short.

Our national future does not demand we revise and malign our past.

For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.

My country has no history, only a past.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

Poles must understand history but we must also overcome it if it is obstructing our contemporary goals.

I think that America has an obsession with history, really.

Let us not suffer from a national amnesia that causes us to forget who and what we are.