Carl Bernstein Quotes

Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.

People seem to lose all respect for the past; events succeed each other with such velocity that the most remarkable one of a few years gone by, is no more remembered than if centuries had closed over it.

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

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

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.

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman.

Happy is the nation without a history.

History is a novel whose author is the people.

For more than 1000 years our spiritual traditions and common values have been nurtured and begotten here. Today, as we restore the value of patriotism, historical memory and cultural tradition, we are seeking firmer bonds with Mount Athos.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

I think that America has an obsession with history, really.

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

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

When the written and spoken word is censored, the urban landscape becomes a nation's only physical link to the past.

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.

History is the memory of states.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

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.

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

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

The collective memory of America is short.

A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.

Our national future does not demand we revise and malign our past.

A nation that forgets its past has no future.