Cultural Legacies Quotes

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.

We sometimes have a tendency to learn the lessons of recent history and convert them into articles of faith.

I feel like history is about going and discovering the great human stories that just are every bit as relevant as anything that's going on today.

I hope that memory is valued - that we do not lose memory.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.

Nothing is possible without men, but nothing lasts without institutions.

Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.

In hunting ideas for books, I look for stories about long-past events that once commanded the world's attention but that, for one reason or another, faded from contemporary awareness.

Malcolm was a firm believer in the value and importance of our heritage. He believed that we have valuable and distinct cultural traditions which need to be institutionalized so that they can be passed on to our heirs.

The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn't be in flashback.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

Tradition wears a snowy beard.

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

We have to preserve folk in its authenticity. Else folk will become fake.

Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves.

My work is as an ethnographic rescuer: a conduit between past and future generations. The urgency of this effort cannot be overstated.

History depends always upon what, for one reason or another, has survived from earlier periods, particularly upon what was written down or pictured.