Jeff Van Drew Quotes

Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it's a blessing. It makes them cautious.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

A society that does not correctly interpret and appreciate its past cannot understand its present fortunes and adversities and can be caught unawares in a fast changing world.

I think that America has an obsession with history, really.

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Poles must understand history but we must also overcome it if it is obstructing our contemporary goals.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

Let us not suffer from a national amnesia that causes us to forget who and what we are.

I don't think the British carry a historical consciousness either.

You cannot survive if you do not know the past.

There comes a time in the history of nations when their peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future.

In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding.

The stories a society tells about itself are a measure of how it values itself, the ideals of democracy, and its future.

Our political differences, now matter how sharply they are debated, are really quite narrow in comparison to the remarkably durable national consensus on our founding convictions.

And it seems to me important for a country, for a nation to certainly know about its glorious achievements but also to know where its ideals failed, in order to keep that from happening again.

This awareness instills a fierce desire to protect that heritage and - in doing so - to educate Americans in the meaning and importance of our pivotal documents.

And one cannot discharge the duty of loyalty without the patient and an open minded study of the institution that marked the country and defined its character.

A nation’s attitude toward its own history is like a window into its own soul.

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

A nation builds museums to understand its own history and to have its history understood by others, to create a common space and language to address collectively what is too difficult to process individually.

Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Unless we know where we've been as a country, we don't know where we are or where we are going.

As Americans, it is always important to remember where we once were and how far we have come.