Collective Memory Quotes

“Faced with the collective forgetting, we must strive to remember”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a [?], like a collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing.”
― Elon Musk

“Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory--part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction....What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”
― Susan Sontag

“Although distortion of the past is widespread, the most common travesty is one of omission, wherein populist leaders neglect to mention the crimes committed by their own side or recollect them in such a way that evades accepting full responsibility. That politicians are so able to evoke historical arguments in these ways results from a prior failure of the society to engage in a full and frank encounter with past wrongdoings.”
― Richard Ashby Wilson, Writing History in International Criminal Trials

“Author complains about "the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.”
― George will, One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation

“A forgotten past is a past that is yet to be. A forgotten history is a memory missing from our collective conscience. An incomplete history is like an incomplete mind that has forgotten who it is and where it came from.”
― A.E. Samaan

“People are forever remembering.”
― Annie Ernaux, Shame

“Idea: A Napster for borrowed nostalgia. It's a place you go to where you can download others' memories.”
― Jarod Kintz, A Memoir of Memories and Memes

“Tholukuthi through these tales we learned there were in fact many untold narratives that were left out of the Seat of Power's tales of the nation, that were excluded from Jidada's great books of history. That the nation's stories of glory were far from being the whole truth, and that sometimes the Seat of Power's truths were actually half-truths and mistruths as well as deliberate erasures. Which in turn made us understand the importance not only of narrating our own stories, our own truths, but of writing them down as well so they were not taken from us, never altered, tholukuthi never erased, never forgotten.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, Glory

“If you don't recognize your own crimes, there's no impediment to continuing them. There's a pretty dramatic example of that right at this moment. This happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's decision to launch the war against South Vietnam. Forgetting the fiftieth anniversary of the launching of one of the major atrocities in post-Second World War history is pretty severe. But almost nobody has noticed it. I don't think we'll hear a word about it. And, yes, that opens the way to further aggression.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“Even if we, as northerners, choose to ignore this history, the victims’ descendants will not”
― William R. Polk, Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North

“Even if we, as northerners, choose to ignore this history, the victims’ descendants [of the global south] will not. Muslims, like Jews, increasingly probe into and publicize their holocaust. The “deep past” already plays a significant role in the growth of Muslim sentiment toward the Christian North. It will play an important role in international affairs far into the future”
― William R. Polk, Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North

“There is no escaping what is contained within our field of memory, be it of the victim or perpetrator. Collective trauma serves humanity and its expansion, because it forms a bridge into different aspects of consciousness, light and shadow. Holding an internal belief that there is only light, disengages the soul from part of the cosmos. The shadow is part of us.”
― Anthea Durand, Illumination of the shadow: Ancestral wisdom from the past for the future

“The excessive greedy players of endless power play, corruption, megalomania, injustice, impunity, and kleptocracy continue to reign for how many succeeding decades?

When will the country stop being corrupted by revisionism, kleptocratic political dynasties, dirty politics, Machiavellian manipulations, political patronage, destructive lies, and a lack of genuine collective memory of the past and the erosion of truth?

This is a long life work-in-progress for honest public servants, marginalised sectors, and the concerned hard-working citizens with the right moral compass:

How to effectively triumph against the oligarchs, kleptocrats, Machiavellian manipulators, megalomaniacs, and the unscrupulous benefactors of corruption, injustice and impunity?

~ Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn writing as Angelica Hopes
an excerpt from Onestopia
Book 3, Solo la verità è bella Trilogy

Genre: political, inspirationa, literary novel

© 2022 Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn”
― Angelica Hopes

“Fiecare timp ar trebui judecat dupa faptele care l-au aprins.”
― Doina Ruști, Mâța Vinerii

“Нікому в Боснії не вигідні швидкі ексгумації: «Не дай Боже, — каже Ева. — Закінчилися б високі заробітки, кар’єри, поїздки на міжнародні конференції. Треба копати повільно. Має вистачити на довгі роки, до пенсії.”
― Войцех Тохман, Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia

“Every generation thinks it’s the last to care. But the soil holds proof of hands that worked before ours.”
― Lawrence Nault

“We are not just made of stardust. We are made of stories, passed hand to hand like fire in the dark.”
― Lawrence Nault