Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.
Interpretation
Memory is shaped by our desires and perceptions rather than objective truth.
This quote highlights the subjective nature of memory, suggesting that what we recall is often influenced more by our wishes and interpretations than by actual events. It emphasizes that our memories are not merely records of truth, but rather constructions of what we wish to remember, potentially leading to skewed perceptions of reality.
In practice
In a speech discussing how our past experiences shape our identity.
Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.
If youre a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.
Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don't want to do it
With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.
Bart Giamatti did not grow up (as he had dreamed) to play second base for the Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then, in time president of the National Baseball League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized that human beings are fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.
We have peace with God as soon as we believe, but not always with ourselves. The pardon may be past the prince's hand and seal, and yet not put into the prisoner's hand.
If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that /needs/ no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all... why then perhaps we /must/ stand fast a little --even at the risk of being heroes.
Hardly anyone in the world is an American
Man is many things, but he is not rational.
Nobody gets argued all the way into becoming a believer on the sheer basis of logic and reason. That requires a leap of faith.
Not much longer shall we have time for reading lessons of the past. An inexorable present calls us to the defense of a great future.
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