Quotes About Revisionism

The Creation Museum isn't really a museum at all. It's an argument. It's not even an argument. It's the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism.

History is what we choose to remember.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

Who controls the past controls the future.

This process of con- tinuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of lit- erature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been re-painted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

Very little is known about the War of 1812 because the Americans lost it.

We have a nasty habit of flushing down the memory hole "the people who lost." Or demonizing them. Going back in time and painting Snidely Whiplash mustaches on their luckless countenances.

The extraordinary thing is the Labour Party's desire to rewrite its only period of majority government in half a century in negative terms.

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

Those who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up.

If history is written by the victorious, what if the victors lied?

We defeated communist Japan.

Always the victor writes the history of the vanquished. He who beats distorts the faces of the beaten. The weaker depart from this world and the lies remain.

Today wouldn't have happened if histories weren't falsified.

If history is written by the victorious, what if the victors lied?

Zweig said of the Joint, "Later, at some future date, we shall again gladly and passionately discuss whether Jews should be Zionists, revisionists, territorialists or assimilationists; we shall discuss the hair-splitting point of whether we are a nation, a religion, a people or a race. All of these time-consuming, theoretical discussions can wait. Now there is but one thing for us to do—to give help.

History, like memories themselves, tended to become distorted with the passing of time, or worse, corrupted with the agendas of those writing it.

When I was young, I thought Kim il-Sung or Kim Jong-il is hero.

We are committed to the past as we need and want it to be; we are no longer interested in the past as it was.

Strange how the past was remade to suit the present.

Memory is revisionist, you know. 'The Houston Kid' was based on true things that happened. But I know - from writing a memoir that I've been working on for awhile - that reconstructing memory is revisionism.

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.