David McCullough Quotes

A people without a history is like the wind over buffalo grass.

Societies perish when people forget where they come from.

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

The sense of German history is a constantly repeated attempt to find the beginning.

A community receives light from its history, it becomes aware of itself by remembrance of its history.

We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are.

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

If a country forgets where it came from, how will its people know who they are?

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.

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.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

Whole generations have forgotten history.

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

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

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

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..

We have a national memory in this country of about 7 minutes.

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

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

Happy is the nation without a history.