Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

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

In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

I think we tend to be kind of ahistorical, and think that life as we are living it in the moment is all we know.

It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history.

I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

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

Film has changed the way we look at the past.

‎The past is always an invented land.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

To look back into the past only makes sense if it serves the future.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

Peter Jones's is a vital public service. He reminds us that while we shouldn't live in the past, we are wiser and stronger when we live with it.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

I know that Europe's wonderful, yet something seems to lack;The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

The Past is such a curious Creature To look her in the Face A Transport may receipt us Or a Disgrace-.

One of the sad things, I think, about the younger generation, quite frankly, is they have less sense of yesterday. And if you don't know who you were, you don't really know who you are.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.