Kurt Andersen Quotes

Poles must understand history but we must also overcome it if it is obstructing our contemporary goals.

People tend to view history as if it were another planet and think the modern world was invented in 1963. I don't agree.

We take it for granted sometimes that certain parts of our history are told, and we take it for granted that we know all that stuff, and we move forward along on that basis, but there are also massive gaps, and we have to try to address them.

You cannot not know history.

Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

One of the things that really bothers me is that Americans don't have any sense of history. The majority of Americans don't have any idea of where we've come from, so they naturally succumb to the kind of cliche version that Ronald Reagan represented.

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

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

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

The general idea of history seems to be that it is the biography of a society…. History is to the common life of many what biography is to an individual.

One should live with history round one.

I don't think it's such a bad idea that people learn the same history in school. I think it tends to ground people and give them something to respond to and react against.

Every film that is made about the past is always a reflection of the present.

History lets you know exactly where you are today. And if you pay attention to it, it gives you a broad perspective of everyone. You can relate it to pretty much any time.

Every generation tailors history to its taste.

The context of history proved invaluable.

You simply can't understand the present if you don't understand the past. There is no more alarming case study of the consequences of historical ignorance than President Trump.

You take a 30-year-old. To him, history began the day he was born. He doesn't know how cold it was 70 years ago unless he's told. He doesn't care. He thinks what's happening now is either the best or the worst, whatever it is, ever. Everybody thinks that.

If I could have anything - you know, and this is across the board for any presidential candidate - I would have a greater acknowledgment of history in our policy and in our affairs.

Histories are to educate so that we understand better for ourselves and for motivation.

Americans are in vital need of the instruction that historians can provide.

As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.

There's nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.