Historical Amnesia Quotes

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

You know that old phrase ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.

What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

The ability to forget the past enables people to free themselves gradually from the pain they once suffered; but it also often makes them repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.

There's a lot we should be able to learn from history. And yet history proves that we never do. In fact, the main lesson of history is that we never learn the lessons of history. This makes us look so stupid that few people care to read it. They'd rather not be reminded. Any good history book is mainly just a long list of mistakes, complete with names and dates. It's very embarrassing.

Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.

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.

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

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

There's a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide.

We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them. For much of the rest of the world we must be the focus of bitter amusement, characters in a satire we don't understand. It is British people that don't learn languages, or British history. Britain is the true scrounger, the true criminal.

Generally people forget the past and the path they took.

Many pundits today are in the habit of misquoting Santayana's epigram, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Maybe some people have come to grief this way, but they are probably fewer than those who have fallen into the opposite error. One is apt to perish in politics from too much memory, Tocqueville wrote somewhere, with equal truth and greater insight.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

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

A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.

The echoes of history are unmistakable in our current climate. The rise in extremist views has created a dangerous environment and radical intolerance (that) leads to a society that no longer celebrates differences, but to instead conspire to demonize those who are different to the point of creating the ‘other.’ The idea of the ‘other’ is an idea that poisons discourse and creates a dangerous wedge throughout our communities. ‘Othering’ rationalizes prejudice. It encourages the willful denial and distortion of reality to enforce preconceptions. ‘Other’ is the kindling that fuels extremism and illiberalism. … The creation of the ‘other’ and that dehumanization of any group based on their differences are the foundations of fascism. It’s an old playbook that has been dusted off and being widely distributed today. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

A nation which has forgotten its past can have no future.

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

Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.

If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

I was raised in an Irish-American home in Detroit where assimilation was the uppermost priority. The price of assimilation and respectability was amnesia. Although my great-grandparents were victims of the Great Hunger of the 1840's, even though I was named Thomas Emmet Hayden IV after the radical Irish nationalist exile Thomas Emmet, my inheritance was to be disinherited. My parents knew nothing of this past, or nothing worth passing on.

When did America forget that it's America?

To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.