National Memory Quotes

The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.

Make-believe has so long held sway that truth arrives on the scene with all the aspect of an ogre. As a consequence, the real history of their country is a sealed book to the vast majority of the Irish. They neither ask for it nor is it given them.

Our country is made up of groups of immigrants who came here hoping for a better life. They created America. It's a sad thing to have so many people not remember that, including Trump.

The time will come when our nation will honour the memory of all the sons, the daughters, the mothers, the fathers, the youth and the children who, by their thoughts and deeds, gave us the right to assert with pride that we are South Africans, that we are Africans, and that we are citizens of the world.

It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

I envy those Hindus and Buddhists who have in their religion philosophy and ancestor worship which build in the believer a continuity with the past, and that most important ingredient in the building of a nation - memory.

Slowly but without question - and Presidents' Day is only one example - Americans are forgetting and ignoring the men and events that have made this nation great.

We say arts education is good for general education, but that's not the point. The arts are what great nations are remembered for. They are a mirror.

Kadar died as a mass killer, and the Hungarian nation can't forget that.

I think that as a Chinese person, nobody will forget that in China's history, there was a war against the Japanese.

I feel like the people from Iceland have a different relationship with their country than other places. Most Icelandic people are really proud to be from there, and we don't have embarrassments like World War II where we were cruel to other people.

And it seems to me important for a country, for a nation to certainly know about its glorious achievements but also to know where its ideals failed, in order to keep that from happening again.

Not only the Archivist alone but all who work for NARA are designated custodians of America's national memory.

A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Well, I think everybody's a little jealous of the Vietnam Wall, even people from wars that already have good monuments. You have a monument like the Wall and nobody ever forgets your war, you can bet on that.

My grandchildren are growing up and they could not understand why the Marcoses are still being crucified although we keep on telling them that we did not steal from the Filipino people.

Nowadays, many Americans have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At cemeteries across the country, the graves of the fallen are sadly ignored, and worse, neglected.

I'm German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn't exist any more.

Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.

Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.

The conviction of our Ukrainian nation is embedded in the pages of its history.

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

As a country, we like to ignore our past. We don't like to look at it.