Bill Duke Quotes

History lets you know exactly where you are today. And if you pay attention to it, it gives you a broad perspective of everyone. You can relate it to pretty much any time.

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.

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

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.

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

We take it for granted sometimes that certain parts of our history are told, and we take it for granted that we know all that stuff, and we move forward along on that basis, but there are also massive gaps, and we have to try to address them.

You cannot not know history.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

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.

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

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

History is a heavy thing everywhere.

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

Know thy history. Let it horrify you; let it inspire you.

A society that does not correctly interpret and appreciate its past cannot understand its present fortunes and adversities and can be caught unawares in a fast changing world.

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

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

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.

The past has to inform the present.

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.

A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin.

Until we perceive the meaning of our past, we remain the mere carriers of ideas, like the Nomads.

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.

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.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.