Eduardo Galeano Quotes

I hope that memory is valued - that we do not lose memory.

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

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.

The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.

When the written and spoken word is censored, the urban landscape becomes a nation's only physical link to the past.

These places, and the ancient things you know, You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'

The bells cease, and the power goes from me, and I descend again to the world of the living; and if in some foolish confiding moment I try to explain why I want to re-live those old days, to tear the Truth out of the past so that all men shall see plainly, perhaps someone will say to me, 'Oh, the War! A tragedy - best forgotten.'

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

We have a national memory in this country of about 7 minutes.

For more than 1000 years our spiritual traditions and common values have been nurtured and begotten here. Today, as we restore the value of patriotism, historical memory and cultural tradition, we are seeking firmer bonds with Mount Athos.

We can't let the past be forgotten.

Memory in America suffers amnesia.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.

I have tried to keep memory alive... I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.

My work is as an ethnographic rescuer: a conduit between past and future generations. The urgency of this effort cannot be overstated.

A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory.

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

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.