Michael Korda Quotes

In France, history is paralyzing.

Is it appropriate still for a German to have a gun? I only use that as an example of a country that's still deeply involved and engaged in the conversations about how to come to terms with the past. Certainly for that country, it's not forgotten.

The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past.

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.

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

I'm sick of making bloody history.

Jewish persecution is a historical memory of the present generation and people fear it in the present day, and that's why those references are so much more powerful. I just understand that better now.

More than forty years of Communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe resulted in an unhappy and artificial division of Europe. It is this dark chapter of European history that we now have the opportunity to close.

In the aftermath of September 11, you can't - as Tony Blair was so fond of suggesting - draw a line under historical events. They don't go away. They come back.

The dark shadow we seem to see in the distance is not really a mountain ahead, but the shadow of the mountain behind - a shadow from the past thrown forward into our future. It is a dark sludge of historical sectarianism. We can leave it behind us if we wish.

America is haunted by an apparition steeped in slavery, and I wanted to remind everyone that, 'Yo, we've got to handle this.'

There's the hypothesis that things just keep happening to Russians, things that keep turning them into the same kind of subjects, as opposed to citizens. The more credible hypothesis, I think, is that there is a kind of trauma, a social trauma that is passed on from generation to generation.

It's not about the past; it's about knowing your history so that you can fight in the present. Otherwise, you don't know who the real enemy is, what the real issue is, because it had been covered by many layers of bad information, of lies, and manipulation.

The few surviving Armenians no longer ask to go home. They do not ask for restitution. They ask simply to have the memory of their obliteration acknowledged. It is a moral obsession, the lonely legacy passed onto the third and fourth generation who no longer speak Armenian but who carry within them the seeds of resentment that will not be quashed.

The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.

'The Act of Killing' helped catalyze this basic transformation in how the media talks about the past.

We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories.

I just love learning about the past and everything we've been through as people and as a country.

My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.

Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it's a blessing. It makes them cautious.

Granddad was deported to a Siberian prison camp at the age of 15.

Our country vanished from the map of Europe after the attack of the Soviet Union against Poland. That is our history. It is a very difficult one.

We have never owned, as a country, the damage done not only to people who were enslaved but to future generations in which they were treated. I think that has damaged the future of many African-American people. Some have risen above it quite nobly, but it has impacted generations, and we have to be able to own that as part of the past.

There is a recurring temptation for any nation, and for any writer who operates within its field of force, to make an ornament of the past: to turn the losses to victories and to restate humiliations as triumphs.

Poland was once a powerful imperial country that disappeared from maps of Europe for more than 100 years. It was partitioned and occupied by the Nazis and the Russians... We pop up and disappear and we do not trust what we are told to believe.