Intergenerational Transmission Quotes

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent community and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today we cannot count on any such inheritance.

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.

I believe that the dysfunctional Muslim family constitutes a real threat to the very fabric of western life. It is in the family that children are groomed to practise, promote and pass on the norms of their parents' culture.

My grandparents from the old country, Latvia, were all musical on my father's side.

Like lots of baby boomers, I was brought up on archaic anthropomorphism. Upstanding Christian dogs. Rabbits with family values. Because the ancient texts and pictures were sacred - Potter, Milne and the rest. Even concerned parents who knew Freud and Jung never saw the contradictions in feeding us on them.

Women are not just victims of oppression or vectors of change. They are the artisans of social capital, that lattice of values that is the glue that holds societies together. It is they who repair the torn social fabric of communities in the difficult post-conflict situations. They are the custodians of values, who nurture these values in the next generation.

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.

I think children learn through their parents.

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

We recognize that violence is a learned behavior. One of the best classrooms for learning violence is in the home.

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

History is a heavy thing everywhere.

The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

I believed in raising my children as I had been raised.

History is a very powerful force.

Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

My grandparents - my mom's parents - they're Jewish. But nobody ever pushed religion onto us. It wasn't something I ever grew up with.

Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think, since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids.

We live not by things, but by the meaning of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.

I hope that memory is valued - that we do not lose memory.

Lie detection is like language; there is a learning window. Telling whoppers to small children seems to be a family tradition in many families.

Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man ... cannot be exempt from the common destiny.

Do you expect, forsooth, that a mother will hand down to her children principles which differ from her own?