“Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.”
The Nazarene, 1939, p. 3.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Sholem Asch 2
Polish-American novelist, dramatist, essayist 1880–1957Related quotes
“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

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

Collected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 25–30.
Collected Works

“Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.”

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