Alfred de Vigny Quotes

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.

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

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

We have a national memory in this country of about 7 minutes.

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman.

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

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.

Happy is the nation without a history.

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

History is simply man’s desperate bid to give substance to his most visionary dreams.

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives.

The future will use and dispose of the memories of people that we knew as history sees fit.

On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.

The past could liberate or imprison - it creates a nation's character, provides the nourishment or the poison a people imbibe in their very marrow.

In France, history is paralyzing.

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

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

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..