Jonas Salk Quotes

I believe that when an elder dies, a library is burned: vast sums of wisdom and knowledge are lost. Throughout the world libraries are ablaze with scant attention.

I think a lot of what I was taught, gathered, and learned is worth keeping. Heritage and "wisdom" and simply personal family and local history enrich the one able to tap such information. As it is I wish I had garnered more from my grandparents and parents.

I started doing some interviews with elderly people in the family because I knew they would pass away and we would lose the power of their story.

What I really had was stories, the oral traditions of my parents. We moved so much that that was really our encyclopedia. A dream world told to me from my parents in the living room.

Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; that's what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

We're trying to let people see what their grandfather told them about.

Oh yes. And a great many of them still do.

I do get pissed off when I'm at some gay event, and there's a 25-year-old, and he has no idea who I am. And I say, 'You need to know more about your gay history, boy.' I think the younger generation takes it a little bit for granted.

The young people think the old people are fools -- but the old people know the young people are fools.

The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.

Listen carefully to what country people call mother wit. In those homely sayings are couched the collective wisdom of generations.

For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.

I beg of you, you good people who want to hear stories told: look at this page and recognize the wisdom of my grandmother and of all old story-telling women!

Knowing what I know about the people who have come before me, and the people who came before them, and what they had to do, it changes my capacity to stay engaged, to stay productive.

my Mamá Grande, a tiny Mayan woman, took me aside when I was an adolescent and told me several things that didn't make a bit of sense to my young and inattentive ears, and as young people tend to waste all attempts of our elders to relay to us wisdom accumulated over the decades, I thought my Mamá Grande had a few mice in the attic.

John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community. I think of my family stories-Mother's in particular-how much I need them now, how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds die with them. The same could be said of each passing whale.

Storytelling is the oldest form of education.

The people in Coming of Age were far less curmudgeonly than you would think. The greater percentage said that without the young we'd be lost. One woman, a former Southern belle, now 87, a philanthropist, says, "Well, these young, their history's been stolen from them. And what have we done to make them respect us?"

…that's what old people are here for, — else their experience is of little use.

It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.

Projection will disappear. And the possibility that was given by motion pictures will be missed. The possibility of there being a real audience - a group of people who have nothing in common, but, at a certain time of the day or the week, are able to look with other nknown neighbors at something bigger than they are. To look at their problems in big. Not in small.

Storytelling, a primitive art, is as old as the beginning of mankind. People want to receive what's out there in the form of stories, not just facts, opinion, analysis.

Community is as endangered by surplus as it is by deficit. If there is too much money floating around it enables people to have no need of each other.

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, and so are you.