Social Memory Quotes

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues.

Remembering doesn’t help the remembered. It is for the rest of us.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away.

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America...

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory.

The American war of 1861-65 is recent enough to be embedded still in cultural memory.

One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some weight to the hidden private life of ordinary people

Everybody has an image of [princess Margaret], to a certain extent. But I felt it would have been harder if we were playing them as they are now. In a way, I don't know how much of a living memory we as a collective have of them in the '50s, when Margaret was 21 and this sort of Elizabeth Taylor. You don't think of your grandparents as being teenagers. You just can't - your brain just can't go there!

The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.

A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.

Millions of years ago, our brains became wired to remember about 150 people as 'close friends.'

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

An important part of what the state does is preserving its history.

You can’t just wave a magic wand and make our history go away..

I haven't studied history - I couldn't give a discourse in medieval literature - but I am a personal historian, and I do a lot to take in the histories of the people around me.

I worry about children not having a sense of any direct connection to the past.

It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

I think the city is the strongest social memory organ of humanity.

Culture survives in smaller spaces - not in the history books that erect monuments to the nation's grand history but in cafes and cinema houses, village squares, and half-forgotten libraries.

Novelists in particular love to rhapsodize about the glory of the solitary mind; this is natural, because their job requires them to sit in a room by themselves for years on end. But for most of the rest of us, we think and remember socially.