Henry Giroux Quotes

For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.

It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

My generation knew pretty well what happened 50 years before our birth. Now I follow all the quiz programs because they are a paramount example of the span of memory of the young generation - they are able to remember everything that happened in their life but not before.

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.

A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation.

It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

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

A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory.

Whole generations have forgotten history.

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.

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.

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

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

The collective memory of America is short.

We can't let the past be forgotten.

Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it's a blessing. It makes them cautious.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.

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

Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.

Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.