"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.”

--Milan Kundera (4/1/1929-7/11/ 2023), Czeck-French novelist (The Joke; Life is Elsewhere; The Farewell Party; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; The Unbearable Likeness of Being; Immortality), short story writer (Laughable Loves), playwright (Jacques and His Master), essayist (The Art of the Novel), and poet.