Edward Sapir Quotes

We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin.

Combine two words, Myth and History. What do you get? Mystery.

On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.

Storytelling is important. Part of human continuity.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Most of our history has been recorded orally. Among us Cherokee people we used to have people who were trained to listen at all meetings and then pass it on.

History is merely gossip.

Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human.

History is the memory of things said and done.

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.

Errors flies from mouth to mouth, from pen to pen, and to destroy it takes ages.

We gladly put antiquity above our age but not posterity. Only a father doesn't begrudge his son's talent.

Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he knows nothing but what has passed under his own eyes.

Other than fiction and poetry I tend to read history.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.

Music was the medium through which knowledge was passed from generation to generation.

People need stories...we use stories to teach, to learn, to make sense of the world around us. As long as we need stories, we will need books.

A yokel mind loves stories from of old, Being the kind it can repeat and hold.

I find that anything culturally significant that happened before '93 I associate with the decade before it. In fact, Oregon Trail is one of a handful of signposts that middle school existed at all.

The revolution of ages may bring round the same calamities; but ages may revolve without producing a Tacitus to describe them.

The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.

This is how deeply rooted stories are, folks. We crave them before we can walk, and we start telling them before we can talk.

Actions of the last age are like almanacs of the last year.

Folklore is the boiled-down juice, or pot-likker, of human living.