Cultural Amnesia Quotes

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

Make-believe has so long held sway that truth arrives on the scene with all the aspect of an ogre. As a consequence, the real history of their country is a sealed book to the vast majority of the Irish. They neither ask for it nor is it given them.

A Dark Age is not just a period in which people no longer know how to do things. The real key is that people no longer remember that certain things can be done at all.

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.”

When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

One of the most extraordinary things about industrial society of the present day is its idiot lack of memory. Tabloids and movies take the place of mental processes and revolts, crimes, despairs pass off in a dribble of vague words and rubber stamp phrases without leaving a scratch on the mind of the driven instalment-paying, subway-packing mass.

A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.

America has become amnesiac, a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.

American music comes from the same tree, but sometimes we get to these places in history where we forget where things come from, and they get compartmentalized.

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

I tend to believe that film can try to save what still can be saved, in terms of our histories, our memories. Because a lot of things are disappearing very quickly, things are changing. We are living in very quick times, and we have a new generation who basically know nothing about events 30 years ago.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

A Church which has lost its memory is in a sad state of senility.

If [America] forgets where she came from, if the people lose sight of what brought them along, if she listens to the deniers and mockers, then will begin the rot and dissolution.

The 'politics of memory' policy appears to work largely by insinuation.

It seems we're not only uninformed about our present, we're ignorant of our past.

It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past

Civilization is very fragile, all it takes is a few decades of chaos for us to forget humanity and turn into animals. Our base natures can take over very fast. We can forget that we are sentient beings, with laws and codes and ethics.

The memory of the American public is about six weeks.

The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.