The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser than the one that comes after it.

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

Sophie Kruger had worked in a house herself, up in Middle Swan. But now she pretended she was quality. There were none so self-righteous as those who rewrote their past.

He always says that those who control the present can rewrite the past.