Mitch Albom Quotes

I do talk and think a lot about the legacy before me. I feel like if I didn't know that people had been in Montgomery sixty years ago trying to do similar things that I'm trying to do, with a lot less, with fewer resources, with less security, with less encouragement, with less opportunity - if I didn't know that, then I think doing what I do would be much, much harder.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

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

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

The past is the father of the present.

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

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.

Nothing I'm doing is without its predecessors.

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

Where are the links of the chain ... joining us to the past?

The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.

History can't be left to fend for itself. For when it comes to history and beliefs and values, we turn our future on the lathe of the past.

What's interesting to me, is a moving someone through time; in a way, history is part of my landscape. And it fascinates me that history can be so easily reflected in what happens today.

Knowing what I know about the people who have come before me, and the people who came before them, and what they had to do, it changes my capacity to stay engaged, to stay productive.

We are the heirs of the ages

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?

Books should be cherished, like children, books are for the next generation, like children, like history.

We cannot reform our forefathers.

When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it beforewhy do we think we can succeed now?

Institutions do live on their history.

We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy that we are free of history. This allows us not to see the circumstances, the historical circumstances of other people.

Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion. In some cases, family stories told by grandparents to little grandchildren. When I say my novels are set in Israel in the last seventy years, this entails the fact that they begin hundreds or thousands of years earlier in time. Everybody comes from somewhere.