Historical Link Quotes

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Throughout history, the organizational evolution of the military has been inextricably linked with that of the business world.

The eternal link between Lincoln's life and Passover - the fact that Lincoln's death, marked in the Hebrew calendar, coincides with Passover every year - is certainly fitting, and perhaps even part of the providence that Lincoln began to see in his own life and the life of his nation.

Books are special, books are the way we talk to generations that have not turned up yet. The fact that we can actually, essentially communicate with the people in ancient Egypt, people in Rome and Greece, people in ancient Britain, people in New York in the 1920s who can communicate to us and change the way we think, and change the things that we believe. I think that books are special. Books are sacred. And I think that when you are selling books, you have to remember that in all the profits and loss, in all of that, you are treading on sacred ground.

Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.

Music was the only voice of cinema for a very long time before we had sound; it's organically linked to cinema itself.

In short, chronological connectivity puts us in touch with the holy. It is at once humbling and exhilarating. I say this as someone who has never followed any formal religious practice. Connection with the past and the future is a pathway that charms us in the direction of sanity and grace.

I am very lucky and grateful to have this living link to a past era, the violin presumably having much more history to it than the later portion that I know.

Whatever part I'm playing, I always carry with me something that's been used by an illustrious predecessor. I'm a great believer in a touching of hands. I have daggers belonging to Henry Irving and Sarah Siddons.

Some air you inhale was exhaled by Cleopatra.