Mal Peet Quotes

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

There's no relationship to the narrative anymore. People want their own interpretation of history. We're compartmentalizing, forgetting what came directly before, like it's not a big deal. That, to me, is a crime.

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

A nation which has forgotten its past can have no future.

I was raised in an Irish-American home in Detroit where assimilation was the uppermost priority. The price of assimilation and respectability was amnesia. Although my great-grandparents were victims of the Great Hunger of the 1840's, even though I was named Thomas Emmet Hayden IV after the radical Irish nationalist exile Thomas Emmet, my inheritance was to be disinherited. My parents knew nothing of this past, or nothing worth passing on.

People don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.

I feel no bond with South Africa, which is curious, since South Africa is where I was born.

You cannot survive if you do not know the past.

I like reading about the past. I'm definitely not a history buff, but I do read a bit of history now and again, and to do that for work is really exciting.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

You know the puritan ethic that started out four centuries ago in this country, needless to say - at least for the moment - a thing of the past - from what I can tell.

Most of my films seem to be about people bewildered by the world around them, who don't fit into it and are trying to understand it.

History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.

Sometimes I wonder where I am from. I am either way ahead or I come from another world. I don't recognise this world.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

History is written not only for posterity but by posterity as well.

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

Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.

You can’t just wave a magic wand and make our history go away..

You simply can't understand the present if you don't understand the past. There is no more alarming case study of the consequences of historical ignorance than President Trump.

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

Too many people take New York for granted. The primary reason is that history is not taught. That's outrageous in a city where the past is still visible.

Beyond institutional amnesia, a rejection of causal analysis is the existential rock on which American Exceptionalism sits. The United States unique sense of itself depends on an ambiguous relationship to the past. History is affirmed, since it is America's unprecedented historical success that justifies the exceptionalism.

The only way we'll know where we're going is to look at the past and to remember who we were through ceremonies and rituals.