Michael J. Knowles Quotes

A nation’s attitude toward its own history is like a window into its own soul.

Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.

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

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

Happy is the nation without a history.

I think that America has an obsession with history, really.

I don't think the British carry a historical consciousness either.

I feel like the people from Iceland have a different relationship with their country than other places. Most Icelandic people are really proud to be from there, and we don't have embarrassments like World War II where we were cruel to other people.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.

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

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

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

The history of this country is told by showing people who have contributed to it.

The sense of German history is a constantly repeated attempt to find the beginning.

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

Beyond institutional amnesia, a rejection of causal analysis is the existential rock on which American Exceptionalism sits. The United States unique sense of itself depends on an ambiguous relationship to the past. History is affirmed, since it is America's unprecedented historical success that justifies the exceptionalism.

Most national holidays in most countries rest on selective memories of the past.

The Law and Justice government does not want a bunch of foreign historians to decide what goes on in 'their' museum.

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.

Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.

A wise nation preserves its records, gathers up its muniments, decorates the tombes of its illustrious dead, repairs its greatest structures and fosters national pride and love of country, by perpetual references to the sacrifices and glories of the past.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Poles must understand history but we must also overcome it if it is obstructing our contemporary goals.

Societies need heroes. So we travel to places where the revisionists cannot dismantle the great.