A Quote by Milan Kundera

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera

Quote Topics

Against Before Begin Books Culture Destroy Erase First First Step Forget Forgetting History Invent Long Man Memory Nation New New Book New Books People Power Somebody Step Struggle Then Will Write

Quote Author

Milan Kundera
Czechoslovakian - Writer
Born: April 1, 1929

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

Milan Kundera

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera

I've seen things change and people forget: the history of Berlin, the history of queer struggle, the history of AIDS, the history of New York changing from an artistic powerhouse to more of a financial one now.

John Cameron Mitchell

The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.

Eric Schlosser

History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and act on, not only his environment, but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason and a new dimension to history.

Edward Hallett Carr

It is said that the history of peoples who have a history is the history of class struggle. It might be said with at least as much truthfulness, that the history of peoples without history is a history of their struggle against the state.

Pierre Clastres

Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance.

Stuart Hall

One must speak for a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality

Antonio Gramsci

Books opened up a whole new world to me. Through them I discovered new ideas, traveled to new places, and met new people. Books helped me learn to understand other people and they taught me a lot about myself. ... Some books you never forget. Some characters become your friends for life.

Judy Blume

Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.

Lewis B. Smedes

It is true that one of the first acts of tyrants is to erase history, to wipe out the recorded memory of a people. With that in mind, it's important to remember that the work that we do as writers, artists and performers will form an essential part of the collective memory that future generations will draw upon. And so we owe it to those future generations to defend that memory and be honest witnesses to our times.

Rene Balcer

We salute our veterans of Pearl Harbor and World War II, whose sacrifices saved democracy during a dark hour. In their memory, a new generation of our Armed Forces goes forward against new enemies in a new era. Once again, we pledge to defend freedom, secure our homeland, and advance peace around the world. Americans have been tested before, and our Nation will triumph again.

George W. Bush

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

Joyce Carol Oates

The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelation of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might learn as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without finality or end, in our cursedly repercussive being.

Anais Nin

The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government." Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated.