Howard Jacobson Quotes

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before.

National events determine our ideals, as much as our ideals determine national events.

Who would have guessed that the shots heard 'round the world 225 years ago would fall on deaf ears in a nation now more sympathetic to the gun-grabbing Redcoat than the gun-bearing rebel?

Governments should encourage and facilitate the teaching of history, but one does not want them to be able to dictate, for political or partisan reasons, what kind of history and interpretations are on offer to children.

I think it has been a tremendous feat on the part of East Germans since 1990 to adapt to everything changing.

That is when the Left is going to love America - when it is not America anymore.

Cultural change always precedes political change.

Almost anybody from the past will hold views discordant with the present.

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.

It is important to understand the philosophy of the city and country.

Nobody can look back into our history and look at everyone who contributed into our development as a country and find someone who's flawless.

I would like people to get a differentiated historical view of Germany.

From John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, presidents have rhetorically opened the door to the frontier for us, and each time, we have turned away to fight over destinations, technologies, and timing.

The U.S. has always understood itself to be united around political principles and not around culture, whereas the nations of Europe have a much more traditional conception of nationhood that is connected to romanticism, which thinks of religion and culture as ingredients of nationhood.

So when people say how horrible it is that Donald Trump is president, well, yeah, but we've faced a lot worse than this and our country went on to go from the world of 'Mad Men' to the world it is today, and that's what's going to happen now. That's what's going to happen in the next 50 years. We're going to be fine.

My Dad always maintained that although Mrs. Thatcher did not look like us, she absolutely thought like us. He referred to her as the first British Asian Prime Minister. Because she shared our core values and beliefs.

And what makes the whites who have these middle-class values have those values? Where did they get it? They didn't have these same values four hundred years, five hundred years ago.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

Europe is a rapidly changing place, on every level. Immigration, post-communist transitions, the unification, steady presence of war and conflict, the inescapable challenges to the notion of national literature/culture-it all exerts pressure upon writers who must be aware of the transformational possibilities of the situation.

There's a distinct American culture that evolved from the United States founding, and that is what made America great, is what allowed the human being to become.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

Histhry is a post-mortem examination. It tellsye what a counthry died iv. But I'd like to know what it lived iv.

Taste for things of the past evolves, doesn't it? What was a masterpiece a hundred years ago is no longer so today.