It is especially easy in our time to forget others, largely because of the conditions in modern society.

I feel that we're living in an era that seems to have forgotten what can and will happen when fascism rears its head. I think we all need reminding of it in the face of those who either deny the past or never knew about it in the first place.

If you're too stupid to understand that a philosophy that favors a federally structured republic, with numerous restraints on the scope and power of government to interfere with individual rights or the free market, is a lot different from an ethnic-nationalist, atheistic, and socialist program of genocide and international aggression, you should use this rule of thumb: If someone isn't advocating the murder of millions of people in gas chambers and a global Reich for the White Man you shouldn't assume he's a Nazi and you should know it's pretty damn evil to call him one.

We may with advantage at times forget what we know.

They fail to see that the attacks against some of us will later be extended to them and their unions. They have forgotten the story of Germany, the story of Spain, the story of France. They have forgotten that united we stand — that all the bona fide union in other civilized countries were crushed, and the labor leaders of the right and left shook hands in concentration camps!

Algunas cosas se hacen tan nuestras que las olvidamos.

It is sometimes expedient to forget who we are.

For too long, it was taken for granted that we would survive because we were Dutch; because Holland would take care of us. In our ignorant innocence or innocent ignorance we overlooked the fact that they were, and historically are, the rulers and we the ruled ones, and that power never renders itself; it has to be conquered, if not by sword then by the mind. And we neglected the mind. We have not studied our rulers well enough, otherwise we would have known that we were programmed to think that we are not programmed; that if we looked the other way long enough and denied the existence of colonialism it would automatically disappear. We forgot that we were trained not to see colonialism as colonialism.

And we forget because we must

... when people charge us with harshness we wonder how they can forget the rudiments of Marxism.

They did good things too, we've got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time.

The two perspectives—doctrine and calculation—were not necessarily in conflict. Ulbricht and his colleagues certainly believed that the way to expunge Nazism from Germany was by effecting a socio-economic transformation: they were not particularly interested in individual responsibility or moral re-education. But they also understood that Nazism was not just a trick perpetrated on an innocent German proletariat.

To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the party’s organizations on all levels.

Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.