“Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.”

—  Sholem Asch

The Nazarene, 1939, p. 3.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence." by Sholem Asch?
Sholem Asch photo
Sholem Asch 2
Polish-American novelist, dramatist, essayist 1880–1957

Related quotes

Colin Wilson photo
Mao Zedong photo

“It is not the misuse of power that is evil; the very existence of power is an evil.”

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter V : Anatomy Of The Corporate State, p. 125

Erich Fromm photo

“Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: Man for Himself (1947), Ch. 3
Context: The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

“Critique in its many manifestations puts up a common opposition to instrumental rationality, because such a rationality can be linked to control in the human condition in a similar way to the idea of power in the control of the natural world.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Robert L. Flood (1990) Liberating Systems Theory p. 204; as cited in: Trudi Cooper (2003) Critical Management, Critical Systems Theory And System Dynamics http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2003/proceedings/orsystems/Cooper.pdf.

Hannah Arendt photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Elie Wiesel photo

“For us, forgetting was never an option. Remembering is a noble and necessary act.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)
Context: For us, forgetting was never an option. Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.

Ovid photo

“Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist, I will still not have the power to forget you.”

Ovid (-43–17 BC) Roman poet

Source: The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters

Related topics