The Ethics of Memory Quotes

“The hope with which I credit moral witnesses is a rather sober hope: that in another place or another time there exists, or will exist, a moral community that will listen to their testimony. What is so heroic in this hope is the fact that people who are subjected to evil regimes intent on destroying the fabric of their moral community easily cone to see the regime as invincible and indestructible and stop believing in the very possibility of a moral community. Being a helpless inmate in a Nazi concentration camp or”
― Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory

“Communities must make decisions and establish institutions that foster forgetting as much as remembering. Shredding the personal files of old Stasi (the former Fast Germany secret services) is an example of a communal decision to forget.”
― Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory

“The horror of falling into utter oblivion is not necessarily the fear of what will happen to us after death but of what it says about our relationships now. It is the fear of not amounting to much in our present relations with others.”
― Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory