Eavan Boland Quotes

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.

Subjugated and dishonoured Germany came to generate that strange compound we have subsequently seen in many countries: harmless nostalgia for the past glories of the ‘people,’ combined with a lethal fantasy of their magnificent restoration.

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

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.

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.

American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.

History is neither a political fable in which all the brothers are valiant and all the sisters virtuous, nor is it a tabloid expose, full of crimes and follies, signifying nothing but victimization. There is, I must admit, a caustic delight in unveiling the frailties of our Jeffersons and our Lincolns, but the delight turns malevolent when it serves only to strip the American past of anything remarkable or exceptional, or when it demeans or discourages civic engagement and confidence.

It’s a little strange, this obsession with the flag. It’s incomprehensible to someone who comes from a country where the flag has, so to speak, disappeared, where any nostalgia and concern for it is a sign of an attachment to the past…

History is an instrument of the most genuine patriotic spirit

I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.

All national histories are partisan and designed to give us a good conceit of ourselves.

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

Our national future does not demand we revise and malign our past.

From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.

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

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

I'm English and love England. Whenever I'm there, I'm always seeing the present but feeling its past.

The notion of American exceptionalism is effective in part because there is little on the face of it that is offensive.

Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs.

Like a lot of Irish households we read a lot of Irish history. It was almost Soviet, raising the next generation with a mythic view of their history.

The conviction of our Ukrainian nation is embedded in the pages of its history.

In France, history is paralyzing.

So I think that I can say, as the President of Poland, we're proud that I am coming from Poland, which is different and what's more important, much better than before.

Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.

It is the champions of "left wing liberal socialism" who shape the tendency towards falsifying the history of socialism. They try to make us believe that the country's past was nothing but mistakes and crimes, keeping silent about the greatest achievements of the past and the present.