It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. That’s not quite correct. We all forget history. The key is whether we have a way to go back to rediscover what we forget. More directly, the key is whether an objective past can keep us honest.

The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.

What we do not wish to remember we sometimes hide. That which we hide long enough is sometimes forgotten altogether, even if it never forgets itself.

What is the past but what we choose to remember?

It is possible not to think about something for a long time, even something unpleasant that happened to you. But what's been claimed in these repressed-memory cases is something, by definition, that's too extreme to be explained by ordinary forgetting and remembering. They're saying that in order to go on in life, you had to wall off this memory, because it would be too painful to live with. Then finally you go into therapy and crack through the repression barrier and out comes this pristine memory. But there really is no credible scientific support for that notion.

You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?

Often in life we forget the things we should remember and remember the things we should forget.

Rien n'imprime si vivement quelque chose à notre souvenance que le désir de l'oublier.

Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event, and without realizing it, change the story at every subsequent remembrance.

In general, past things come to be in the memory not as they were, but as we would like or how we wanted them to have been.

Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.

Sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are and if the whole past wasn’t once entirely different from anything we remember, and we’ve forgotten that we forgot.

Every time we think about the past, we rewrite history as part of bringing a moral order to the present. (2021)