Collective Forgetting Quotes

When it comes to certain portions of our history, we've just forgotten it all.

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

Wars become history all too soon and are forgotten all too soon as well, before the lessons can be learned.

A nation that forgets its past has no future.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

What would the future of man be if it were devoid of memory?

There's no relationship to the narrative anymore. People want their own interpretation of history. We're compartmentalizing, forgetting what came directly before, like it's not a big deal. That, to me, is a crime.

It's rare that we actively and consciously 'forget'; most of the time we have simply forgotten, with no consciousness of having forgotten. In individuals, the phenomenon is called 'denial'; in entire cultures and nations, it's usually called 'history.

And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.

It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.

The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.

In a landscape littered with all of this imagery about the nobility of the Civil War and the Confederate effort and struggle, the absence of markers says something really powerful.

Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.

There is a permanent amnesia planted in us, which just as we keep forgetting our dreams, we sometimes keep on forgetting our reality.

Americans have no sense of history. And not much memory. They don't remember what happened yesterday.

History will be erased in the universal purgatory.

We have a national memory in this country of about 7 minutes.

The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.

Memories were short and history unkind. It was the way of the world.

Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself.