Steve Berry Quotes

One great feature of modern society is the institutionalized respect we give to processes designed to destroy the past.

Whole generations have forgotten history.

I've got to relearn what I was supposed to have learned.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

People seem to lose all respect for the past; events succeed each other with such velocity that the most remarkable one of a few years gone by, is no more remembered than if centuries had closed over it.

The people will perish if their scholars pass away.

A nation that forgets its past has no future.

The most that I can learn is in records that you burn.

Wisdom is founded on memory; happiness on forgetfulness.

White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was ... we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

To be ignorant of the past is to be forever a child.

There is an ancient script that says, 'He that wishes to be ignorant, let him be ignorant.' But I took off the last word and it now reads for me like this: He that wishes to be ignorant, let him be!

Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.

Out of monuments, names, words proverbs ...and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.

It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal - otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again.

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.

I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc. It does not behoove us, who were only savages and barbarians when these Indians and Chinese peoples were civilized and learned, to dispute their antiquity.

There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.

The infant periods of most nations are buried in silence or veiled in fable; and the world perhaps has lost but little which it needs regret. The origin and outset of the American Republic contain lessons of which posterity ought not to be deprived: and happily there never was a case in which every interesting incident could be so accurately preserved.