Whittaker Chambers Quotes

Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

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

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

A nation’s attitude toward its own history is like a window into its own soul.

A nation is a work of art and a work of time.

Happy is the nation without a history.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

History is a novel whose author is the people.

No nation is formed within a night, one generation's era of even two. A nation can be described as the continuous string of many generations that time, this pitiless, thoughtless sword of nature, separates their physical connections along the course of their history.

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

The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In our architecture, as in all our other arts-indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole-ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.

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

I don't think the British carry a historical consciousness either.

I'm English and love England. Whenever I'm there, I'm always seeing the present but feeling its past.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

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.

Tradition is the illusion of permanance.

A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: its memories are no less revealing than its aims.

It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

Our American heritage is greater than any one of us. It can express itself in very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the sunset skies.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

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