Dalai Lama Quotes

With each passing decade, history becomes less real for us, less immediate and essential to our way of life, and so, like 'green' nature, more of a commodity or an advertising gimmick.

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

From the outside you may see all the social indicators of decline, but from the inside I see an extremely tenacious people interested in holding on to their traditions.

We've got to map all of our ancient history before it's gone because, let's face it, if we don't have a common heritage to share, something to get excited about, then what are we living for?

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

Monuments are for the living, not the dead.

Cambodia is not only a country of war, but also a country of culture. It's in our DNA.

The 'garra charrua' is something we're proud of, even if other people sometimes misunderstand it.

You cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil that is not native to it.

Culture is coded wisdom

If you forget your roots, you've lost sight of everything

I know that everything essential and great originated from the fact that the human being had a homeland and was rooted in tradition.

Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.

Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle.

Like Spain, I am bound to the past.

As far as Germany extends it ruins culture.

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.

Italian style for me is to have a sense of tradition, respect for one's roots, and a sartorial approach.

Yankee Stadium, it's like everything else in this country. In Europe, they save all their old buildings for history. Here, we just tear them all down.

The arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.

Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.

Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion. In some cases, family stories told by grandparents to little grandchildren. When I say my novels are set in Israel in the last seventy years, this entails the fact that they begin hundreds or thousands of years earlier in time. Everybody comes from somewhere.

Because men really respect only that which was founded of old and has developed slowly, he who wants to live on after his death must take care not only of his posterity but even more of his past.

The mark of a Scot of all classes [is that] he ... remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation.

I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that's vanished - the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.