Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. 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.

The German people is not marked by original sin, but by original nobility.

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

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

An accurate knowledge of the past of a country is necessary for everyone who would understand its present, and who desires to judge of its future.

A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

World history is a court of judgment.

There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.

I don't think you should ever run from history. You should learn from it and embrace it.

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

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

History is the memory of states.

Happy is the nation without a history.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

History is a novel whose author is the people.

Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.

Writing history is writing the soul of the past...

In a certain sense all men are historians.

A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.

Money is great, but history is something that you can never get rid of and act like it didn't happen.

I don't think I've ever spoken to anyone who's told me that the story of 'Roots' isn't important.

Our national future does not demand we revise and malign our past.

Every action or inaction has an impact-good or bad-upon our surroundings, and anything we do today will have an impact on the lives of our grandchildren.

Where man had been, in every place he left, garbage remained. Even in his pursuit of the ultimate truth and quest for his God, he produced garbage. By his garbage, which lay stratum upon stratum, he could always - one had only to dig - be known. For more long-lived than man is his refuse. Garbage alone lives after him.