Amos Oz Quotes

In fact, every one of us - every nation, every individual begins hundreds, perhaps thousands of years prior to the date that appears in the passport.

Everyone's past is locked up in their recipes - the past of an individual and the past of a nation as well.

Israel is too attached to America, too influenced by America. It should be connected to Europe. America is based on mythology - the free man, the individual, the open frontier. Europe is more conscious of history. Take Britain and Shakespeare. You shape your identity through history.

Do we have to give Mr Sarkozy a history lesson? Yes, there are Gauls among our ancestors. But there are also Romans, Normans, Celts, Nicois, Corsicans, Arabs, Italians, Spanish. That's France.

There is no future for a people who deny their past.

You can't know who you are, as a nation or a people, unless you know where you've been.

Unless you're one of the first Americans, a Native American, you came from someplace else. Somebody brought you.

For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.

No human being really begins on the day which appears in the passport as their date of birth. We all begin much much much earlier.

If [America] forgets where she came from, if the people lose sight of what brought them along, if she listens to the deniers and mockers, then will begin the rot and dissolution.

Australia without the Irish would be unthinkable... unimaginable... unspeakable.

I've travelled a lot, but I am essentially American. All my input has been American.

Once [China] had a destiny. Once she was a conqueror. Now her greatest destiny seems to be merely to exist, to survive.

How can I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a concept?

America is a melting pot for all different groups of people, historically. And it's rare that the story of all of these people will be told in the history books. So I always felt I had to find out my history for myself and research my roots.

After two decades of reconstruction work, I want to work on projects that lay at the intersection of cultural diplomacy and national identity - ones that empower local communities to define progress, not have it sanctioned by others.

A nation that forgets its past has no future.

We are undermining a generation's happiness by depriving them of national identity, religious identity, and gender identity

It's important for us to tell our stories.

Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.

We must give Italians a sense of race.

If you don't know where you come from, it's difficult to determine where you are.- It's even more difficult to plan where you are going.

Everything that makes a society run is broken in Iraq. The only real structure is the people's own sense of themselves as Iraqis, which was very strong. They're a proud people, and they trace their historic roots way, way back.

Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.