Robert Smithson Quotes

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

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

I want my buildings to take root and look as if they've always been there. It isn't about pastiche or adapting what's already there. It's about trying to blend the future and the past.

As soon as I heard there were people in Germany who wanted to restore the old part of Dresden, I wanted to help. Even before the Nobel, I had started this group, the Friends of Dresden. The destruction of Dresden made a big impression on me when I was a child, and I wanted to do this.

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

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.

The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.

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.

The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations.

Architecture is measured against the past; you build in the future, and you try to imagine the future.

We, who are the living, possess the past. Tomorrow is for our martyrs.

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

People do not connect with what happened last week, let alone what happened 20 years ago.

Monuments are for the living, not the dead.

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

People seem to lose all respect for the past; events succeed each other with such velocity that the most remarkable one of a few years gone by, is no more remembered than if centuries had closed over it.

Everything new appears from the elements of the Past, because “ex nihilo nihil fit.” The prolific development of culture requires that the inventory of values be kept in the memory of tradition and passed to future generations

We should not put up statues of living people. We make ourselves hostage to fortune.

If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.

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.

Not only is the past of a person with no memory inaccessible; his ability to think about the future is imperilled. Time travel, then, is ultimately - and paradoxically - an exercise in remembering. And without that capacity it simply cannot exist.

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.

A nation that forgets its past has no future.

Posterity shall know of me even less than I shall know of posterity.