Historical Recollection Quotes

My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering.

Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.

Memory is the keyword which combines past with present, past and future.

I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past

A people who still remembered that their ancestors had been the masters of the world would have applauded, with conscious pride, the representation of ancient freedom, if they had not long since been accustomed to prefer the solid assurance of bread to the unsubstantial visions of liberty and greatness.

The collective memory of America is short.

The reality of any place is what its people remember of it.

There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was"...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

This is the place. Stand still, my steed,- Let me review the scene, And summon from the shadowy past The forms that once have been.

Statesmen remember things selectively.

Memories are their own descendents masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.

The memory of man is as old as misfortune

It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being