Michael Portillo Quotes

But we cannot rely on memorials and museums alone. We can tell ourselves we will never forget and we likely won't. But we need to make sure that we teach history to those who never had the opportunity to remember in the first place.

I always try to find a story in the margins of history, but I don't like to do too much that's improbable.

Making history whole is about uncovering secrets.

My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.

We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.

Certainly Amadeus because it was a very powerful time for me, we filmed it in the Czech Republic at a time of lots of social and political change going on in that part of the world.

I like historical pieces. History was my favorite subject in school, it was the only subject I excelled in. I love the idea of history and the idea that we may have the opportunity to learn from our past mistakes.

I think that America has an obsession with history, really.

I've always liked lost, old New York.

I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.

If you look at that incredible burst of fantastic characters that emerged in the late 19th century/early 20th century, you can see so many of the fears and hopes of those times embedded in those characters. Even in throwaway bits of contemporary culture you can often find some penetrating insights into the real world around us.

People don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.

With each passing decade, history becomes less real for us, less immediate and essential to our way of life, and so, like 'green' nature, more of a commodity or an advertising gimmick.

What would we do without plaques to tell us who lived where and when? They introduce the past into the present, and are the quickest and most interesting way of reminding us that our streets exist above and beyond the here-and-now.

And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.

I love history, so I do a lot of movies about history.

Because we are all of an oral tradition in our beginning histories, the voice of the poet in this particular society will be heard.

As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us.

I think people in general have neglected to learn about history.

In high school, I began to dig my way into Ethiopian history, and began to understand myself as a young man formed by multiple narratives.

In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.

Like other Americans, U.S. journalists have often neglected the study of history; they have much remedial work to do in trying to understand who did what to whom, why and when - and who did it first.