Nikolay Trubetskoy Quotes

For more than 1000 years our spiritual traditions and common values have been nurtured and begotten here. Today, as we restore the value of patriotism, historical memory and cultural tradition, we are seeking firmer bonds with Mount Athos.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

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

An expert is someone who knows a lot about the past.

History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion.

I think my attitudes about the past are very traditional. You can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.

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.

The modernity of yesterday is the tradition of today, and the modernity of today will be tradition tomorrow.

The future has a lot to do with the past.

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.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.

Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

There is complete disdain for all that exists .... History, society, and the economics of present institutions are all minor issues in choosing a reform program ...

We can neither ignore the history of the past nor create the future.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent community and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today we cannot count on any such inheritance.

All states need to hallow themselves with the dignity of the past.

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.

The control of the past depends above all on the training of 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.

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

If you understand this refrain, you're gonna' understand everything I want to say to you today. It has four parts: Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it ., Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past ., Ours is less and less a free society.

History, we now know, is not merely, of even primarily, past politics, it is also past economics, past society, past religion, past civilization, in short—past everything.

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

I would say that normally it is the creative minorities that determine the future, and in this sense, the Catholic Church must understand itself as a creative minority that has a heritage of values that are not things of the past, but a very living and relevant reality.