Collective History Quotes

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

The president is the face of the State of Israel around the world: not a representative of a specific ideology but of the collective creativity and history of the Jewish people.

the history of melancholia includes all of us.

I'm trying to tell history with a capital H through histories with a small h. It moves people, because you know in your own personal relationships, your own story, there's an echo to a much larger reality.

The history of the race is but that of the individual "writ large".

Individual lives remind us that there is something called a common humanity and that, over the centuries, there have been people who have lived and breathed and sometimes worried about very different things and sometimes worried about the same things we do.

But it's been funny to try and carry the through line, but I think the main thing is the relationship that the band has because we have spent now all this time together that I think that's sort of what we returning to. And whenever we get to play together, it still sort of returns to that little shitty rehearsal space. So that's good.

The word "collective" is not so often used because it has been basically used by socialists and communists and has a different history. The word "cooperative" means the workplace itself is organized cooperatively, rather than in the conventional capitalistic, hierarchical form.

I think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story.

If I wait for the great definitive story of my people to come around, I'm never going to work.

the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all

The power of the story sheds a light and great perspective on well known facts. The power of cinema draws on that collective history.

None of our republics would be anything if we weren't all together; but we have to create our own history - history of United Yugoslavia, also in the future.

Americans, more than most people, believe that history is the result of individual decisions to implement conscious intentions. For Americans, more than most people, history has been that.... This sense of openness, of possibility and autonomy, has been a national asset as precious as the topsoil of the Middle West. But like topsoil, it is subject to erosion; it requires tending. And it is not bad for Americans to come to terms with the fact that for them too, history is a story of inertia and the unforeseen.

In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.

Fantasy is, at its best, the purest access to storytelling that we have. It universalizes a tale, it evokes wonder and timeless narrative power, it touches upon inner journeys, it illuminates our collective and individual pasts, throws a focus beam on the present day, and presages the dangers and promises of the future.

These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.

It's profound to watch a little African-American girl light up when she raps as George Washington and she realizes that Washington's story is her story. That this history belongs to all of us.

All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences.

My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.

We have our own history, our own language, our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the destinies of other people - history has made us all South Africans

It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals

Europe was initially supposed to be primarily a political project! The EU never would have come about had it been up to experts or diplomats. It was created by people who had learned from the drama of our collective history. I am proposing a new beginning, not one in which it is first deliberated ad infinitum what instruments one needs, but one that follows from the goals we want to achieve.