Elie Wiesel Quotes

I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

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

Cultural goods … are the source of the Nation's identity, continuity and development.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

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

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.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.

In fact history does not belong to us; but we belong to it.

There are lots of stories about my culture that I think bring a whole other perspective to who we are and where we have been and how we got here that I think need to be done.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

A nation is a work of art and a work of time.

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.

The greatest guarantee for the preservation of a person’s identity is language and faith, and all Armenians must carry these two values.

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

I believe that culture begins in the cradle . . .To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.

Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

I think the history and the past we have is just an energy we've built up to do what we do now.

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.

Education is the transmission of civilization.

Change is no threat to culture.