Norman Davies Quotes

Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

The bells cease, and the power goes from me, and I descend again to the world of the living; and if in some foolish confiding moment I try to explain why I want to re-live those old days, to tear the Truth out of the past so that all men shall see plainly, perhaps someone will say to me, 'Oh, the War! A tragedy - best forgotten.'

I don't think you can erase history.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

For centuries, the horrors of war have been sculpted by artists so people would never forget.

Never, ever forget history.

Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.

There are moments in history that people should be reminded of.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.

People do not connect with what happened last week, let alone what happened 20 years ago.

Memorials become relics if they do not stir our modern conscience.

I write in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done.

Never forget

We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.

… the whole earth is the sepulcher of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives.

They are shooting at people for reasons they don’t remember.

Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

History is a heavy thing everywhere.

The truth about the Holocaust must not die.

Memory in America suffers amnesia.