Preservation of Memory Quotes

We must study history to learn its lessons, absorb its spirit of possibility, extract and emulate its models of excellence and possibility and honor the moral obligation to remember. We must measure ourselves in the mirror of the best of our history and constantly ask ourselves how can we use the past as a foundation to inform, expand and enrich our present and future.

To converse with historians is to keep good company…

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

People in millenniums ahead will know what we were like in the 1930's and the thing that, the important major things that shaped our history at that time. This is as important for historic reasons as any other.

History is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

For the Archivist, this role is a result of his obligation to preserve and assure timely and maximum access to our governmental records in the evolving historic saga of the American people.

A page of history is worth a volume of logic.

But we cannot just take this historical fact for granted. We must make it live.

All states need to hallow themselves with the dignity of the past.

History is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

I'm trying to get to a deep future, but in order to get to a deep future, I had to think about the deep past.

Mere recording of an event will not make it a historical document. It will become obsolete with time. Only those that emotionally connect with the audience will stand the test of time.

Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.

… so that in 50 years no one could claim that this did not happen.

Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom.

Everything new appears from the elements of the Past, because “ex nihilo nihil fit.” The prolific development of culture requires that the inventory of values be kept in the memory of tradition and passed to future generations

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.

I do think the past changes at a slower rate. It sits a little more still for its portrait.

As soon as I heard there were people in Germany who wanted to restore the old part of Dresden, I wanted to help. Even before the Nobel, I had started this group, the Friends of Dresden. The destruction of Dresden made a big impression on me when I was a child, and I wanted to do this.