Pierre Salinger Quotes

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

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

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

Societies perish when people forget where they come from.

My work is as an ethnographic rescuer: a conduit between past and future generations. The urgency of this effort cannot be overstated.

It seems we're not only uninformed about our present, we're ignorant of our past.

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

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.

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

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

The collective memory of America is short.

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

It seems like people don't learn from the past.

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

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

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.

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

We've got to map all of our ancient history before it's gone because, let's face it, if we don't have a common heritage to share, something to get excited about, then what are we living for?

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

When I was in South Africa, I went for dinner with some friends, and I knew more about their history than they did - it just hasn't been told.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

The future will use and dispose of the memories of people that we knew as history sees fit.

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