Cultural Memory Quotes

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

It's not about the past; it's about knowing your history so that you can fight in the present. Otherwise, you don't know who the real enemy is, what the real issue is, because it had been covered by many layers of bad information, of lies, and manipulation.

You take a 30-year-old. To him, history began the day he was born. He doesn't know how cold it was 70 years ago unless he's told. He doesn't care. He thinks what's happening now is either the best or the worst, whatever it is, ever. Everybody thinks that.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

My generation knew pretty well what happened 50 years before our birth. Now I follow all the quiz programs because they are a paramount example of the span of memory of the young generation - they are able to remember everything that happened in their life but not before.

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

Had the Holocaust happened in Tahiti or the Congo, as it has; had it happened in South America, as it has; had it happened in the West Indies, as it has - you must remember that within fifty years of Columbus's arrival, only the bones remained of the people called the Arawaks, with one or two of them in Spain as specimens. Had the Holocaust committed under the Nazis happened somewhere else, we wouldn't be talking about it the way we talk about it.

When I wrote 'The Alexandria Link,' I discovered that we are only aware of about 10 percent of the knowledge of the ancient world. In the ancient world, most of the knowledge was destroyed. Every emperor of China who came in wiped out everything that came before them, to the point that the country completely forgot its past.

I love my people's history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors' past.

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

I think there's value in experience and observations that link past to present.

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

History is the story of events, with praise or blame.

The world's history is the world's judgment.

Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.

Understand me, Hollywood miniseries are very popular in England. But British miniseries make a tremendous mark on the national consciousness. They become part of the national culture and mythology... at least for a time.

It may not be art, but it is history.

I've not worn a dress since about 1985. It always amazes me how there is still a fascination for it in England. The rest of the world doesn't seem to care. I'm not sure whether they don't remember or whether they've just moved on from it. I was brought up in the glam era.

History is an antidote to the hubris of the present.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues.

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.

Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style.

I'd experienced the '40s and '50s by looking at my grandparents' old clothes, books, and magazines.