Thus, monumental or exemplary history is not defined in the first instance in terms of excess, but by the usefulness of models to "emulate and improve"; through this history, "great moments ... form links in one single chain." Now, it is precisely greatness that historical sickness levels into insignificance. It is therefore onto utility that the excess is grafted: it consists in the abuse of analogies that result in "entire large parts of [history being] forgotten, scorned, and washed away as if by a gray, unremitting tide, and only a few embellished facts arise as islands above it." This is how the past is damaged. But the present is as well: the unbounded admiration of the great and powerful figures of the past becomes the travesty behind which the hatred of the great and powerful of the present is concealed.
Quoted from: Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (2006), p. 290.
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