Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture.

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

I am an American, steeped in American values. But I know on an emotional level what it means to be of the Chinese culture.

Cultural goods … are the source of the Nation's identity, continuity and development.

The classics should be set in students’ minds so that they become the genes of Chinese national culture.

There's a reason why the cultures of so many Chinatowns around the world in some ways are more Chinese. They've held onto older Chinese rituals, traditions, and symbols in ways that, if you go back to China today, they're not holding on to. They're getting married in white dresses and in churches.

Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

What is China but a people and their stories?

History is a compass that you locate yourself on the map of human geography, politically, culturally, financially.

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.

I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.

China's culture and history are closely related to my living environment. This country is my birthplace. It is also where I grew up. Its culture and history shape my relations with family, friends, society, and daily life.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

The Berbers belong to a powerful, formidable, and numerous people; a true people like so many others, the world has seen - like the Arabs, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans.

The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth.

Architecture is the work of nations

Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society

I remember, like, literally saying - watching some cowboy-and-Indian movie with my mother, and I go, so, if we were back then, we'd be the Indians, right? She goes, yup, that's who we'd be. We wouldn't be those guys in the covered wagons. We'd be the Indians.

Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.

Custom ... changes the very nature of things; and what was honorable a thousand years ago, may probably be looked upon as infamous now.

The destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves.