David Miliband Quotes

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

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

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

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

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

A nation without a language is a nation without a heart.

Nationalism is spiritual and all-embracing, in the sense that it opens its arms to and spreads its wings over all those who have shared with the Arabs their history and have lived in the environment of their language and culture for generations, so that they have become Arab in thought and feeling. There is no fear that nationalism will clash with religion, for, like religion, it flows from the heart and issues from the will of God; they walk arm in arm, supporting each other, especially when religion represents the genius of the nationality and is in harmony with its nature.

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

The greatest guarantee for the preservation of a person’s identity is language and faith, and all Armenians must carry these two values.

The greatest guarantee for the preservation of a person’s identity is language and faith, and all Armenians must carry these two values.

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.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

In the coming decades, questions of identity, meaning cultural heritage, language, and religion will play a central role in politics.

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

I do not want to be misunderstood that you need a dose of persecution in order, really, to have a sense of your identity. Otherwise, you know, there would be no American Jews. Even if you're not strictly, fiercely Orthodox, you commit yourselves to a community of memory.

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

I'm of Arab background.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

The Gaelic language itself depends very much on ear and rhythm, and when those who are thinking in Gaelic speak in English, they get the same rhythm.