Preservation Challenges Quotes

To win victory is easy; to preserve its fruits, difficult.

It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history.

Not every town can or should be saved.

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.

The future of that ancient chamber remains in considerable doubt.

High among the unpredictable variables that endanger the survival of worthy buildings are the vagaries of taste.

I've often wondered if the trade-off for growing up in the relative newness and freshness of the West Coast was befuddlement when it comes to historical preservation. We don't have many old things, and we don't really know what to do with the few that are around when our default response is to compost or field burn.

'Restoring' is a very arrogant concept. If you're taking a house from 1812, do you restore it to how it looked the day after it was built, or restore it to the way it looked in 1828, or the way it looked in 1872? Do the minimum to stop it from falling apart, and then get away.

Great collections of books are subject to certain accidents besides the damp, the worms, and the rats; one not less common is that of the borrowers, not to say a word of the purloiners

When I stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording, a mere accumulated, and not trulycumulative treasure; where immortal works stand side by side with anthologies which did not survive their month, and cobweb and mildew have already spread from these to the binding of those; and happily I am reminded of what poetry is,--I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall. Alas! that so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole!

It seems we will continue to have problems with this classification and it may be because it comes under the heading of creation rather than preservation.