Rithy Panh Quotes

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

Museums are western inventions where the rich and the powerful or the government and the state tend to exhibit the signs and symbol and images of their culture.

I'm not becoming western; I am still following my Pashtun culture, and I'm wearing a shalvar kamiz, a dupatta on my head.

A country, a style or an epoch are interesting only for the idea behind them.

It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history.

We never wore burkas because Somalis had our own culture.

If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.

It may not be art, but it is history.

It is not within the competence of the public authorities to determine culture. Their function is to promote and protect the cultural life of everyone, including that of minorities.

The coming of age of Canadian culture may not depend on our ability to protect it at home, but to project it on the world’s stage.

A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.

The one thing I won't do is sacrifice my Indian identity in my music, my clothing choices. It's something I tried to hide growing up, and I would never do that again because it's such a big part of me and I'm very proud of it.

Sometimes we make films just for our people, and it doesn't reach to anyone.

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.

The loss of the culture is one of the main reasons Ciro Guerra wanted to tell their story.

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.

A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation.

What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself.

I've never left my culture. I've left my country, but I've not left my culture. In the same way, you shouldn't be worried why George Lucas is going to the outer galaxy to make a movie. He's still making a film within his culture; he's making an American film. I go to Thailand or the Peruvian jungle, the Amazon, and I still make Bavarian films.

Historical memory is a potent weapon in fighting against the desert of organized forgetting and implies a rethinking of the role that artists, intellectuals, educators, youth and other concerned citizens can play in fostering a reawakening of America's battered public memories.

I want to be remembered as someone who tried to bring the story of our ancestors to the broadest possible audience. I want to be remembered as a man who loved his race.

I think the basic culture of this country is European and Christian and I think that if we lose that, we lost America...I don't think we should suppress other races, but I think if we lose that White - what's the word for it - that White dominance in America, with it we lose America.

My generation knew pretty well what happened 50 years before our birth. Now I follow all the quiz programs because they are a paramount example of the span of memory of the young generation - they are able to remember everything that happened in their life but not before.

I think that is what we do by preserving and telling our stories. If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change. So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.

No nation can survive without passing its heritage, language and, yes, faith to the next generation. A country must be built on something substantial and if the cultural elitists think it can be built on 'diversity,' that is a foundation of shifting sand.