Milan Kundera Quotes

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

A person without a memory is either a child or an amnesiac. A country without a memory is neither a child nor an amnesiac, but neither is it a country.

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

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.

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.

I suppose being the kind of creatures we [people] are, we like to censor the past, and are selective, or want to be selective about the things that we remember. If you want to destroy people, destroy their memory, destroy their history.

Every time we revise our history, we also revise the mythology of our history.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

America has become amnesiac, a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

I think cinema is the memory and the imagination of the country. Take the memory and imagination out of an individual, and he stops being an individual. I think it's the same thing for a country.

I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for 'history.' The closest word for it is memory.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.

A nation is a work of art and a work of time.

A people without a history is like the wind over buffalo grass.

Not a single one, not a single one among us [French Canadians], in 200 years, has won a battle... and this is what it is to be colonized! When we have but martyrs! How can we have aspirations!? How can we have the will to fight!?

The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory

History is the most dangerous substance that the chemistry of the intellect has created…. I makes men dream, intoxicates them, breeds false memories in them, aggravates their responses, takes up their ancient grievances, torments them in their sleep, carries them into the delirium of grandeur or else of persecution, and turns nations bitter, intolerable, and vain.

If you forget your history, you forget who you are.

I don't think you can erase history.

Literature is the memory of humanity.

I believe that culture begins in the cradle . . .To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.