National Narrative Quotes

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

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.

Happy is the nation without a history.

American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.

American exceptionalism is the recurring character in the nation's narrative.

A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

I'm not saying this in a condescending kind of way, but it's quite simple: The making of America was a heroic thing. Australia has a much murkier, much more complex view of its history. It's just full of all these open wounds we don't really know what to do with.

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman.

American myths have never been colorless.

This is America; our icons are complicated.

Everyone in China knows The Topics. The television stations and newspapers run the same state-generated stories all across the country, and the Chinese form their opinions based on these somewhat controlled sources.

The whole westward expansion myth is seen as romantic. But it's a joke, a blot on American history.

If a country forgets where it came from, how will its people know who they are?

The rise of a new kind of political science in the 1960s has been driving a wedge between political insiders and voters ever since. By turning voters into interest groups, it stopped establishment leaders from articulating a national narrative. It opened the way for Movement Conservatives to create today's political crisis.

The truth is, everything we know about America, everything Americans come to know about being American, isn't from the news. I live there. We don't go home at the end of the day and think, "Well, I really know who I am now because the Wall Street Journal says that the Stock Exchange closed at this many points." What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories. It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines. It comes from popular culture.

I feel the political failings of the U.S.A. are presidential in length, but the aspirant narrative of the States is millennial in length.

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

At different times my children went to Polish, British, and American schools, and they learned about 'the nation' in all of them.

In the U.S., highly selective renditions of its history have served in practice to impose blinkers on some of its citizens and catered to vested interests.

The collective memory of America is short.

Unless we know where we've been as a country, we don't know where we are or where we are going.