Daily Inspiration Quote by Oriana Fallaci

Fallaci’s line lands like a field report from the front: history isn’t a tasteful elective, it’s survival gear. Coming from a journalist who built her reputation in war zones and political interrogation rooms, “the past” isn’t museum glass; it’s intelligence. She’s arguing that the present is rigged with older patterns - propaganda techniques, sectarian grievances, imperial hangovers, the recycled language of “security” and “order” - and that ignorance is a kind of voluntary disarmament.

The verb choice matters. Not “thrive,” not “understand,” but “survive.” That’s Fallaci at her most combative: she treats civic life as a high-stakes conflict between memory and amnesia, where the penalties are real. The line also carries a warning about power. If you don’t know the past, someone else will supply it for you, pre-packaged as myth, nostalgia, or national destiny. In that sense, the quote is less about reverence for tradition than about defense against narrative capture.

There’s subtextual impatience, too: Fallaci distrusted complacency and the polite fantasy that each crisis is unprecedented. She’s talking to modernity’s favorite pose - the smug belief that we’ve “moved on” - and calling it naive. For a reporter, the past is context; for a citizen, it’s leverage. Without it, you don’t just misread events. You walk into the same traps with fewer words for what’s happening, and fewer tools to resist it.