Ai Weiwei Quotes

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

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

History is with us until we learn from the suffering of the past.

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

If we are to put the past on trial, where do we stop?

There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you if you don't repeat it.

We have become aware of the responsibility for our attitude towards the dark pages in our history. We have understood that bad service is done to the nation by those who are impelling to renounce that past.

And it seems to me important for a country, for a nation to certainly know about its glorious achievements but also to know where its ideals failed, in order to keep that from happening again.

We stand on the watershed dividing the past from the future. Let us bury the past in so far as it is dead and forget all bitterness and recrimination. Let there be moderation in speech and writing.... There has been violence—shameful, degrading and revolting violence—in various parts of the country. This must end. We are determined to end it. We must make it clear that political ends ae not to be achieved by methods of violence now or in the future.

Our goal is to move forward, but we know that to avoid falling backward, we must be willing to look backward and to come to terms with what happened in the past.

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

There were exceptions, a couple of families that just plain didn't want to even think about it, although forty years had passed but mostly the people were very interested in talking about it.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

As Members of Congress and people of conscience, we must work to overcome the indifference and distortions of history, and ensure that future generations know what happened.

Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future - that's fabulous.

To communicate the truths of history is an act of hope for the future.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

We have to forget the past. History is something that even today we are paying the consequences, and the future is integration. We all as a people, as citizens, as the leadership of both countries should be looking in that direction.

Reconciliation does not mean covering history with a blanket. Reconciliation means truth, justice and love. Justice without love can degenerate into vengeance. We need to know the truth for medicinal reasons, so that what happened … will never happen again.

We committed serious mistakes against our people, our authority, and our dream of statehood. To make up for these mistakes, we must confess our failure first, and then take immediate action. Our people are noble and deserve from us the commitment to think … for their benefit. We cannot let our people’s destiny be set free to chance, a chance that under a new world order, may take yet another eternal struggle without opening a door of hope.

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

A nation is a work of art and a work of time.

We have to go into the past to go further and further into the future.

Spain today, rather than a nation, is a cloud of dust remaining after a great people have galloped down the highway of history.