Quotes About Memory

I wish I could have 25,000 years of my personal family history documented in a very powerful computer or a CD-ROM that I could just pop in and my computer would never crash

I won't make a mark on history. I have some importance in the time we live in, but that's all.

I don't care so much anymore about 'good photography'; I am gathering evidence for history.

History, of course, is never real. People either glorify it or horrify it. Or at the very least color it.

For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.

Any historical narrative is a bundle of silences.

History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

We cannot escape history.

He only deserves to be remembered by posterity who treasures up and preserves the history of his ancestors.

I am not a chess historian - I myself am a piece of chess history, which no one can avoid. I will not write about myself, but I am sure that someone will write.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

If every human rights atrocity is described as a Holocaust,[Adolf] Hitler's attempted obliteration of the Jewish people is diminished or de-recognised in our history.

History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

History is a pack of lies we play on the dead.

We may not live in the past, but the past lives in us.

History is the memory of things said and done.

History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club.

Those who did not live during the years close to 1789 do not know the pleasure of living.

Not a stone but has its history.

It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

Longing on a large scale makes history.

Peter Jones's is a vital public service. He reminds us that while we shouldn't live in the past, we are wiser and stronger when we live with it.