Stephen Daldry Quotes

There comes a time in the history of nations when their peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future.

In Eastern Europe, the past is not only always hovering over the present, it is not even passed. It waits, like some malevolent caged beast, ready at any moment to escape and bring back all the horrors.

Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it's a blessing. It makes them cautious.

Guns are part of the American identity.

Don't carry a gun. It's nice to have them close by, but don't carry them. You might get arrested.

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

It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

I feel like the people from Iceland have a different relationship with their country than other places. Most Icelandic people are really proud to be from there, and we don't have embarrassments like World War II where we were cruel to other people.

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.

There is a fundamental difference between the Polish experience of the state and the Russian experience. In the Polish experience, the state was always a foreign power. So, to hate the state was a patriotic act.

The past could liberate or imprison - it creates a nation's character, provides the nourishment or the poison a people imbibe in their very marrow.

In France, history is paralyzing.

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.

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.

Happy is the nation without a history.

No great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory

No people can live in the past - not even in its own past. But if it no longer has a link with its history, it must of necessity perish. Persia, crowded with hardship and glory, ordeals and hopes. With the help of the Almighty, the lessons of the past constitute the best guide for the citizens of the future.

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

The collective memory of America is short.

We wouldn't take a gun away from a law-abiding citizen. We wouldn't take a gun away from anyone.

If you go around Colombia or Latin America, without doubt you will find that 80 per cent of the time, you're discussing the past and only 20 per cent about the future.

We're in the west, and we have a rich history of gun ownership and hunting, but people here across the state understand the difference between public safety and personal ownership and that we can have both if we protect the second amendment.

There is a recurring temptation for any nation, and for any writer who operates within its field of force, to make an ornament of the past: to turn the losses to victories and to restate humiliations as triumphs.

It took Austria a long time to be honest about its past.

Not a single federal dollar should be used for states or cities efforts to target law-abiding gun owners.