societal memory Quotes

No individual and no generation has had enough personal experience to ignore the vast experience of the human race that is called history. Yet most of our schools and colleges today pay little attention to history. And many of our current policies repeat mistakes that were made, time and again, in the past with disastrous results.

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.

If you read Animal Farm, you know that humans traditionally forget the reason we have revolutions in the first place.

You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn't that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

Wars come and wars go but the world does not change: it will always forget an indebtedness which it thinks it expedient not to remember.

And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

Americans care about their past, but for short term gain they ignore it and tear down everything that matters.

Memory in Greek mythology is the mother of the muses, and it is so for me. Both personal and societal memory move me strongly, and that is one of the sources of my writing.

I think that we need history as much as we need bread or water or love.

What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?

At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.