Historical Loss Quotes

By the time the traditionally male lexicographers become interested in looking at fashion words, their origins are lost in the mists of time.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

When I wrote 'The Alexandria Link,' I discovered that we are only aware of about 10 percent of the knowledge of the ancient world. In the ancient world, most of the knowledge was destroyed. Every emperor of China who came in wiped out everything that came before them, to the point that the country completely forgot its past.

We have destroyed 80 percent of the statues. There is only small amount left and we will destroy that soon.

We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories.

You have to realize that, when it comes to the South, we carry around a lot of baggage. The South lost the war, and I spent years denying my culture.

I've seen things change and people forget: the history of Berlin, the history of queer struggle, the history of AIDS, the history of New York changing from an artistic powerhouse to more of a financial one now.

Ancient barrows get cleared away. Legislation is pretty much 19th century. Global warming means there is an awful lot of erosion, exposing new archaeology, there is not the funding around to deal with it.

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.

Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed

When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.

History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power has destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again.

You see all these old buildings [in Rio] going down or catching fire overnight, and it is so sad. I am very connected with these buildings because they are our history. It is the only one that we have.

Terrible news. Ronald Reagan’s library just burned town. Both books. But the worst part is that he hadn’t finished coloring the second.

Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

I think there's probably really wonderful music that has been lost due to the lack of preservation methods way back in the day.

If you're constantly being reminded of the ways in which your history and your narrative as a people were rooted in loss and decay, then you're in deep trouble. Once you make a certain kind of peace with the past, then you should be completely oriented towards speculation about the future.

The problem is Russia is a country that has lost 300 years of its history, in terms of most of what was part of the Russian Empire in Europe, towards Europe, since Peter the Great, has been the territory that is no longer under Russian rule.

... the progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it.

The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century - it was actually mummified, skin and all - but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire.

You think looting is bad in Egypt, look at Peru, India, China. I've been told in China there are over a quarter-million archaeological sites, and most have been looted. This is a global problem of massive proportions, and we don't know the scale.

While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years.

John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

Literature is a fragment of a fragment. Of all that ever happened, or has been said, but a fraction has been written; and of this but little is extant.