“Quit telling us to forget the past and never look back. We learned from the past, gained wisdom from the past that we apply every day in the process of living. If we forget the past, we’ll forget who we are since that’s where we came from.”
1990
Related quotes

About the Holocaust, at a meeting with evangelical pastors in Rio de Janeiro, on 11 April 2019. Bolsonaro: Brazil will vote ‘in line’ with Israel, US at UN Human Rights Council https://www.timesofisrael.com/bolsonaro-brazil-will-vote-in-line-with-israel-us-at-un-human-rights-council/. The Times of Israel (14 April 2019).

“Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.”
As quoted "Literary witness to century of turmoil" in China Daily (24 November 2003)

“You can't forget the things you did in the past, or you'll never learn from them.”
Source: City of Fallen Angels

Sir Edmund Hillary : King Of The World
Context: The explorers of the past were great men and we should honour them. But let us not forget that their spirit lives on. It is still not hard to find a man who will adventure for the sake of a dream or one who will search, for the pleasure of searching, not for what he may find.

“We forget cruelty and past betrayal,
Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.”
"The White Goddess," lines 18–22, from Poems and Satires (1951).
Poems
Context: But we are gifted, even in November,
Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense
Of her nakedly worn magnificence
We forget cruelty and past betrayal,
Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.

(1964) Post-election statement. Virginia Morell, Ancestral Passions: The leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings, Copyright 1995, Chapter 19, beginning.