Quotes about History

For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.

I have no doubt that historians will conclude that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

Foolish the doctor who despises the knowledge acquired by the ancients.

I don't want my past to become anyone else's future.

But because of his telling, many who did not believe have come to believe, and some who did not care have come to care. He tells the story, out of infinite pain, partly to honor the dead, but also to warn the living - to warn the living that it could happen again and that it must never happen again. Better than one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.

The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria...

At the time of the liberation of the camps, I remember, we were convinced that after Auschwitz there would be no more wars, no more racism, no more hatred, no more anti-Semitism. We were wrong. This produced a feeling close to despair. For if Auschwitz could not cure mankind of racism, was there any chance of success ever? The fact is, the world has learned nothing. Otherwise, how is one to comprehend the atrocities committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia…

Even if I wrote on nothing else, it would never be enough, even if all the survivors did nothing but write about their experiences, it would still not be enough. *Response when asked how much longer is he going to write about the Holocaust.

It was a destructive novel of acquired ideas. To finally wake up in a state of creative anguish, to lose oneself in order to find oneself again, to sleep in the arms of a beautiful student whose name one didn't know, to fall back to sleep over a love poem-that was called existence. The harmonics of artistic creation, of fertile sensibility, of anticipated events-history in movement-that was called a privilege.

To forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

How was it possible that men, women, and children are being burned and that the world kept silent?