Eric Weiner Quotes

The past could liberate or imprison - it creates a nation's character, provides the nourishment or the poison a people imbibe in their very marrow.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

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

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

Christianity doesn't demand that we worship our ancestors. If we don't remember our ancestors, then, in all likelihood, we cannot also recall the distant past.

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman.

We of French origin have the sentiment of our own individuality. We want to hand down to our children the language we received from our forefathers.

Myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, 'Who am I?'

I just grew up in the States, so I feel like I identify more with the American culture.

To speak about yourself, you must first be able to assemble a sense of origin. For descendants of slaves, this has proved one of the most precious losses of self-knowledge we've endured.

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

It's like we're suffering from an identity crisis, and that identity is in our arts and the fact that we don't find it chief amongst our agendas to teach our kids who we are as a nation and the battles we've had on this ground and how they've been successfully resolved. We can't enjoy the fruits of the labor of our ancestors.

It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

If you're constantly being reminded of the ways in which your history and your narrative as a people were rooted in loss and decay, then you're in deep trouble. Once you make a certain kind of peace with the past, then you should be completely oriented towards speculation about the future.

People need their history like they need air and food.

We must give Italians a sense of race.

The western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other is, or can be) the true American one.

Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.

All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.

It is not about promoting a distinct and great American culture because today's Democrat Party does not believe in one.

My country has no history, only a past.

I believe that the faith heritage of this country is actually a very important part of America's culture.

I have to laugh when the English claim they are such a wonderful nation. Everyone knows that Englishmen are really Germans, that the English kings were German, and that in Russia the emperors were either of German origin or received their education in Germany.