Zeenat Aman Quotes

Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.

The inventory goes down the elevator every night.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.

… science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race....

The southern colonists were not preoccupied with their own historical significance and mostly did not bother even to make the records of births, marriages, and deaths that they required of themselves by law. Nor did they write accounts of what they were up to for the benefit of posterity.

Filing is concerned with the past; anything you actually need to see again has to do with the future.

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.

The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

It is not deeds or acts that last: it is the written record of those deeds and acts.

I think we are definitely suffering from an information overload, but I believe that there is going to be better and better ways of organizing that information and processing it so that it will enhance your daily life. I just think that technology and information, it's overwhelming at the moment, but it's really going to make life better.

Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.

If I'm expected to keep your messages, and everybody else's, then there should be a law that says, you need to keep all of these.

Jeremy Popkin's collection of first-person narratives of the Haitian Revolution is an extremely valuable work, accessible, sound and intelligent. I only wish such a book had been available fifteen years ago when I was in the early stages of researching my series of novels. Popkin has been deft and tactful in stitching together these excerpts, and as a result, he manages to tell a complete version of the Revolution almost entirely in the words of the people who experienced it-this book engaged me deeply.

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.

When I was a kid, I thought history was the most boring subject of all. I shouldn't blame my teachers; I should blame me, but I'll blame them.

When you find things that are tried and true for millennia, you can bet that it's going to happen tomorrow.

Most archivists don't like surprises. That's why we work in the past.

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

Get the weirdnesses into the data where you can manipulate them easily, and the regularity into the code because regular code is a lot easier to work with

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.