Carl Sandburg Quotes

Societies perish when people forget where they come from.

If [America] forgets where she came from, if the people lose sight of what brought them along, if she listens to the deniers and mockers, then will begin the rot and dissolution.

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.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

People tend to believe that to be modern you have to disengage from your heritage, but it's not true.

The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.

In every country and region, there are practices and ways of living and culture that have been handed down from ancestors. Naturally, I feel that these should be respected.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Tradition is a very powerful force.

Having uncritically accepted [Western] culture in everything, we now find we have lost our hold on the autonomous ideals of the Japanese race.

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

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

If I don't make heritage visible and the strength of mother tongue important for my grandchildren, it scares me that they might say in 20 years from now, 'Well, it is rumoured that we used to be Africans long ago.' And in many urban areas, it's already happening.

When the faith dies, the culture it produced begins to die, then the civilization goes, and, then, the population.

We should draw on our story, we should draw on our history. If we don't know who we are, if we don't know how we became what we are, we're going to start suffering from all the obvious detrimental effects of amnesia.

We created a thing called culture and civilization, and now we're about to lose it because we're trying to destroy everything. And I kind of miss it. I miss culture and civilization.

We need the rock of the past under our feet in order to spring forward into the future.

... the more we recruit from immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about culture, or even know what it is.

Everything that makes a society run is broken in Iraq. The only real structure is the people's own sense of themselves as Iraqis, which was very strong. They're a proud people, and they trace their historic roots way, way back.

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.

Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way.

From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.

The almighty dollar and the lust for world wide fame, slowly killed tradition, and for that someone should hang.

There is a mandate to impose a voluntary return to traditional values.

Centuries from now our great-great-great-grandchildren will look back at us with amazement at how we could allow such a precious achievement of human culture as the telling of a story to be shattered into smithereens by commercials, the same amazement we feel today when we look at our ancestors for whom slavery, capital punishment, burning of witches, and the inquisition were acceptable everyday events.