Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

It is important for all of us to appreciate where we come from and how that history has really shaped us in ways that we might not understand.

I think history is inextricably linked to identity. If you don't know your history, if you don't know your family, who are you?

I think the history and the past we have is just an energy we've built up to do what we do now.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

A nation is a work of art and a work of time.

How will we know it’s us without our past?

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Everybody's past and history informs them.

You can't build a future if you don't have a past.

Returning to your family and where you came from, and your history... this is what makes you strong. It's not looking out that's going to do that - it's looking in.

If anything is life-changing, being the descendant of a slave is.

You're not just this person who's from your own specific experiences, but the collective experience of what makes you who you are because of time.

In my view, you can't go to the future if you haven't come from the past.

Think about what there is to learn from your heritage, good and bad, and about what you want to cultivate and not cultivate.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

You can't leave the thing that you are, the house that has become your biography.

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.

This is the country that lives in us .... There it must find its nutriment or die.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

Architecture is a political art connecting our values to the ages.

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.