Alexandra Petri Quotes

There's nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

If we look too closely at many historical figures, we won't like what we see.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.

History is a battleground... but it has always been the case. Remembering is a radical act. Choosing what is important and what belongs in the overstuffed metaphorical dustbin of history is of vital importance.

People talk from memory and memory often plays false.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past

A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.

History is what we would make of it.

Memory is often less about truth than about what we want it to be.

Happy memories … need to be put in context. I have interviewed many white people who have fond memories of their lives in the 1950s and early 1960s. The ones who never cross examined these memories to get at the complexities were the ones most hostile to the Civil Rights and the Women’s Movements, which they saw as destroying the harmonious world they remembered.

Oh do not read history, for that I know must be false.

Random forays into the history of political language with undue regard for the detail of historical context all too often end up as exercises in self confirmation.

If you ask two people to remember a specific event, the stories are going to vary wildly because we always make ourselves out to be the hero.

We tend to paint the past only in extremes, as having been either categorically better than the present or irredeemably bad.

Can we ever understand the past, or do we just endlessly rework it to suit us in the present?

‎The past is always an invented land.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

The news is notoriously inaccurate, and our memory of it is even worse.