Andrzej Wajda Quotes

Think about what there is to learn from your heritage, good and bad, and about what you want to cultivate and not cultivate.

I grew up in a wonderful blend of a lot of old culture.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

I always had my roots in the past.

I believe that culture begins in the cradle . . .To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.

I think history is inextricably linked to identity. If you don't know your history, if you don't know your family, who are you?

It is important for all of us to appreciate where we come from and how that history has really shaped us in ways that we might not understand.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for 'history.' The closest word for it is memory.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

The greatest guarantee for the preservation of a person’s identity is language and faith, and all Armenians must carry these two values.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

I like places that have history in the sense of - you feel responsible to it.

I think that our comfort is in our history.

Literature is the memory of humanity.

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.

In the West the past is like a dead animal. It is a carcass picked at by the flies that call themselves historians and biographers. But in my culture the past lives. My people feel this way in part because death does not separate us from our ancestors.

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

My heritage has been my grounding, and it has brought me peace.

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

I love my heritage!

You can't run from your roots.