Chris Abani Quotes

Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me.

Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.

In every generation, there are horrors that define an age and events that scar the global conscience.

We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.

The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.

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.

History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

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

Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.

Most of us get our history through story.

Japan is the only country in the world which suffered from the scourge of nuclear weapons.

Memorials become relics if they do not stir our modern conscience.

Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risks of infection.

Being connected with individual lives reminds us in the most basic way of the human face of history. Too often we forget how significant the lives of ordinary people are.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

We can not escape history.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

This agency forbade the speaking of Indian languages, prohibited the conduct of traditional religious activities, outlawed traditional government, and made Indian people ashamed of who they were. Worst of all, the Bureau of Indian Affairs committed these acts against the children entrusted to its boarding schools, brutalizing them emotionally, psychologically, physically, and spiritually. Even in this era of self -determination, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs is at long last serving as an advocate for Indian people in an atmosphere of mutual respect, the legacy of these misdeeds haunts us.

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

The events of the time may be transmitted to posterity; but the agitation of the public mind can never be fully comprehended but by those who were witnesses of it

You can't erase history.

I love and I'm intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.

I don't think you can erase history.

When you're a kid, what you learn in school about being German has a sort of heaviness about it, and you have a sort of guilt with you.

The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time.