Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.
Alan BennettRead
Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the way we commemorate past tragedies while also forgetting the underlying truths about them.
In this quote, Alan Bennett critiques the collective tendency to remember the fallen in war through commemoration yet simultaneously choose to overlook the complexities and responsibilities surrounding those events. He suggests that while memorials like the Cenotaph and rituals such as the Last Post are designed to honor the dead, they can also serve to obscure the deeper truths and failings of society, thus allowing people to forget rather than properly confront the realities of war and its consequences.
Themes
WarMemoryCommemorationTruthLoss
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech honoring veterans, this quote can be used to highlight the complexity of remembering those who served.
More from Alan Bennett
All quotes →To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
Alan BennettRead
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
Alan BennettRead
Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
Alan BennettRead
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
Alan BennettRead
The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
Alan BennettRead
Similar quotes
Why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones?
George R. R. MartinRead
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Vladimir NabokovRead
Among us, in our part of the country, those who are upright are different from this. The father conceals the misconduct of the son, and the son conceals the misconduct of the father. Uprightness is to be found in this.
ConfuciusRead
I had displeased the jacobins by blaming their aristocratic usurpation of legitimate powers; the priests of all sorts by claiming religious liberty; the anarchists by repressing them; and the conspirators by rejecting their offers.
Marquis De LafayetteRead
See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
Henry David ThoreauRead
I always wondered if there was a purpose to the universe, if there was a plan, if there was some sort of organizing factor, hopefully that I played a role in.
John GreenRead