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

“When everything east of Europe was called ‘Russia,’ entire cultures disappeared behind a single word.”
― Angelika Regossi, Russian Colonial Food: Journey through the dissolved Communist Empire

“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

“In childhood, overhearing everyday conversations among relatives about collectivization, famine, war, and political repression, I perceived these stories as curious — sometimes frightening — episodes my loved ones had endured.
Although they belonged to a past not so distant, I felt them as something that had happened long ago, almost like events that occurred only slightly later than the fairy tales I loved so much.
Much of what I heard I did not yet understand, but my young memory — still largely unfilled — carefully recorded these fragments of history, preserving events and facts deep within its silent annals.”
— Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One. Author's foreword


Context note:
This reflection from the author’s foreword shows how the collective trauma of the early twentieth century entered a child’s consciousness indirectly — through family conversations, half-understood words, and inherited memory. What first felt distant and almost mythical would later reveal itself as lived history, shaping both the author’s worldview and the moral foundation of the novel.”
― Володимир Шабля, Камінь. Біографічний роман. Книга перша. Перші кроки до світла та назад: Дитинство та занурення в ГУЛАГ.