Collective Memory Quotes

• Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Spiritual, Memories, Psychology

  Tariq Ramadan (2012). “Islam and the Arab Awakening”, p.125, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.

  Haruki Murakami

  Memories, Taken, Self

  Haruki Murakami (2011). “1Q84: Books 1 and 2”, p.275, Random House

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• For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

  Elie Wiesel

  Memories, Past, Would Be

  Elie Wiesel (2012). “Night”, p.14, Macmillan

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• 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

  Memories, Artist, Tyrants

  Speech to the "Central Academy of Fine Arts" in Beijing, December 8, 2009.

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• One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory.

  Aldo Rossi

  Memories, Cities, People

  Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman (1982). “Architettura Della Città”, p.130, MIT Press

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• I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.

  Mahmoud Darwish

  Memories, Self, Collectives

  "Poet of the Arab world" by Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. June 7, 2002.

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• History attempts to provide society with an artificial collective memory.

  Ralph Davis

  Memories, History, Collectives

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• In some ways more painful is the fact that their experience appears to be fading from the collective memory of humankind. Having never experienced an atomic bombing, the vast majority around the world can only vaguely imagine such horror, and these days, John Hersey's Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth are all but forgotten. As predicted by the saying, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' the probability that nuclear weapons will be used and the danger of nuclear war are increasing.

  Tadatoshi Akiba

  Memories, War, Fate

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• Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time after time mankind must learn the hard lessons of history-the lessons that for some dangerous and awful reason we can't seem to keep in our collective memory.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Memories, Reality, Rocks

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• Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.

  Ang Lee

  Birthday, Memories, Years

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• As I like to say, the entire collective memory of the species - that means all known and recorded information - is going to be just a few keystrokes away in a matter of years.

  Dee Hock

  Memories, Mean, Years

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• The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels.

  Rupert Sheldrake

  New York, Memories, Past

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• The rich and complex history of South Carolina is the history of the African diaspora, and in many ways, I felt acutely the sense of this collective memory of migration, suffering and transformation while living in South Carolina.

  Kwame Dawes

  Memories, Suffering, South Carolina

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I want my work to become part of our visual history, to enter our collective memory and our collective conscience. I hope it will serve to remind us that history's deepest tragedies concern not the great protagonists who set events in motion but the countless ordinary people who are caught up in those events and torn apart by their remorseless fury. I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.

  James Nachtwey

  Photography, Memories, People

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• There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time. The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth- through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.

  Charles de Lint

  Memories, Distance, Two

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• To collude in the minimisation of British history on the grounds of its imagined irrelevance to our rebranded national future, or from a suspicion that it does no more than recycle patriotic pieties unsuited to a global marketplace, would be an act of appallingly self-inflicted collective memory loss.

  Simon Schama

  Memories, Patriotic, Loss

  Simon Schama (2000). “A History of Britain: At the edge of the world? 3000 BC-AD 1603”, Miramax

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• I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

  Haruki Murakami

  Memories, Writing, Thinking

  "What Haruki Murakami talks about". Interview with Heidi Benson, www.sfgate.com. October 26, 2008.

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• This is taking [photos] from everybody - the entire collective memory of what the Earth looks like - and linking all of that together.

  Blaise Aguera y Arcas

  Memories, Technology, Together

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• I think I've got a peculiar disease. I call it the curse of history, and it has to do with the fugitive absence/presence of both personal and collective memory. At first I thought it was a kind of personal illness, just related to time, private time, time that passes in one's life. So I decided to forget and throw myself into the future.

  Gilles Peress

  Memories, Thinking, Peculiar

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• Outsiders think of Silicon Valley as a success story, but in truth, it is a graveyard. Failure.. is Silicon Valley's greatest strength. Every failed product or enterprise is a lesson stored in the collective memory of the country. We not only don't stigmatize failure, sometime we even admire it. Venture Capitalists actually like to see a little failure in the resumes of entrepreneurs.

  Michael Malone

  Country, Memories, Thinking

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• I say to the [European countries]: Hurry up and apologize to our nation, because if you do not, you will regret it. This is because our nation is progressing and is victorious. Do not leave a black mark in the collective memory of the nation, because our nation will not forgive you.

  Khaled Mashal

  Country, Memories, Regret

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• Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival.

  Harold Innis

  Memories, Writing, Special

  Harold Adams Innis (2007). “Empire and Communications”, p.31, Rowman & Littlefield

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• I came to dedicate my life to opening space to the average person and crafting designs for new spaceships that could take us far from home. But since Apollo ended, such travels were only in our collective memory.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Memories, Home, Average

  "Commentary: Let's aim for Mars". www.cnn.com. June 23, 2009.

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