We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

Guare’s remark laments a cultural drift toward forgetting—treating ignorance of the past as comfort, convenience, or even virtue. By calling amnesia “the most wished-for state,” he suggests that individuals and societies often prefer the relief of unaccountability to the burdens of memory: guilt, complexity, and the obligation to learn. The follow-up question—“When did history become a bad word?”—frames historical awareness as something newly stigmatized, as if remembering were pedantic, divisive, or obstructive to progress. The quote functions as a critique of presentism and willful forgetting, warning that a society that disparages history risks repeating its failures and losing the narratives that give meaning to civic and personal identity.