Historical Memory Quotes

“What we call historical memory is a creature of time and place. Emotional and political needs of the present intersect with past events. For memory, like perception, can never be simply factual. All our memories are reconstructions.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America

“Well, that was one thing you had to give [Makann] credit for. He wanted to run out the Gilgameshers. Everybody was in favor of that.

Now, Trask could remember something he'd gotten from Harkaman. There had been Hitler, back at the end of the First Century Pre-Atomic; hadn't he gotten into power because everybody was in favor of running out the Christians, or the Moslems, or the Albigensians, or somebody?”
― H. Beam Piper, Space Viking

“Historical memory is hijacked by those who carry out war. They seek, when the memory challenges the myth, to obliterate or hide the evidence that exposes the myth as a life. The destruction is pervasive, aided by an establishment, including the media, which apes the slogans and euphemisms parroted by the powerful. Because nearly everyone in wartime is complicit, it is difficult for societies to confront their own culpability and the life that led to it.”
― Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

“Those who do not forget the state's losses wanted to forget the children executed by organizations.”
― Aytekin Yılmaz, Ernesto'nun Dağları