“A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory.”
Source: Cold Friday (1964), p. 40
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Whittaker Chambers 33
Defected Communist spy 1901–1961Related quotes
“Our nation's memory is long and our reach is far.”
Public statement in response to the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. In: Schweid, Barry (August 10, 1998) " Albright Offers $2M Bombings Reward http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1998/Albright-Offers-$2M-Bombings-Reward/id-199d52a55e4601c022b587363eefe099".
1990s
Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter I, Old English Law, p. 3
Source: Lord of the Flies (1954), Ch. 4: Painted Faces and Long Hair.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis
Context: Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope. Give us leave to live! The eternity that is like an eternal present, without memory and without hope, is death. Thus do ideas exist in the God-Idea, but not thus do men live in the living God, in the God-Man.
“Any nation that does not honor its heroes will not long endure.”
Not by Lincoln, this is apparently paraphrased from remarks about honoring him by Hugh Gordon Miller: "I do not believe in forever dragging over or raking up some phases of the past; in some respects the dead past might better be allowed to bury its dead, but the nation which fails to honor its heroes, the memory of its heroes, whether those heroes be living or dead, does not deserve to live, and it will not live, and so it came to pass that in 1909 nearly a hundred millions of people [...] were singing the praises of Abraham Lincoln." — from [http://www.archive.org/details/reportsons00sonsuoft "Lincoln, the Preserver of the Union" (22 February 1911), an address to the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York.
Misattributed
Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.
Variant translation, as quoted in TIME (25 February 1974).
Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print", it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another