Where history means nothing. Lessons are forgotten. Memories – of humanity, of all that is humane – are lost.

Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all history. In it, history evaporates.

It is my conviction that when events are forgotten, buried in the cellar of the page, they are no longer even history.

[N]ews... is full of noise and... history is largely stripped of it.

The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century.

A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn't notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn't have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction.

History is a sequence of random events and unpredictable choices, which is why the future is so difficult to foresee.

The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period.

The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution—today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions—no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake.

However, the most surprising and shocking part is that modern historians of all shades have quoted and confirmed this without any scrutiny. Thus, History has been overtaken by myths and fiction.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Without a sense of history, our expectations are the product of how we live now.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

Anything but history, for history must be false.