“Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.”

— Charles Stross , book Glasshouse

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 17, “Mission” (p. 288)

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Charles Stross 211

British science fiction writer and blogger 1964

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Si nada se nos fuera durante la vida, se nos iría la vida sin nada.
Voces (1943)

“The general loss of memory is not to be explained solely psychologically; it is not simply childhood amnesia. Rather it is social amnesia—memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamic of this society.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 4

“Not an enforced amnesia but an unsparing memory - that is what will build a nation.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Source: A secular agenda, 1993

“I think the only answer is to live life to the fullest while you can and collect memories like fools collect money. Because in the end, that's all you have - happy memories.”

Sarah Strohmeyer (1950) American writer

Source: Kindred Spirits

“Anything negative about the country or the regime will be rapidly erased from the collective memory. This memory deletion is being carried out by censoring newspapers, magazines, television news, the Internet and anything that preserves memories.”

Yan Lianke (1958) Chinese novelist and satirist

"On China's State-Sponsored Amnesia"

“A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction
Context: A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.