Emily V. Gordon Quotes

Without understanding your history, you can't get a perspective about the present.

If you forget your history, you forget who you are.

History is a heavy thing everywhere.

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.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

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

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

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

We've got to know our history. We have to be able to bring our children to a place that they can be proud of.

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

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

I really feel sorry for kids who aren't interested in history - recent history, either, because it is this that made us what we are.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.

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

If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

It may not be art, but it is history.

The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory

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

I think if we don't understand history, if we don't keep referring back to it, we become complacent. And complacency, as we all know, it leads to repeating history.

I was always pretty interested in my history. Not just the history of the Caribbean, the history of my people, but all walks of life.

I don't think you can erase history.