Peter Burke 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.

Until we perceive the meaning of our past, we remain the mere carriers of ideas, like the Nomads.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Design can successfully bind the ancient nomadic cultures with today's global marketplace, ensuring the preservation of traditions and knowledge for further generations. This aspect of research is obviously rich in its business potential as well.

A society that does not correctly interpret and appreciate its past cannot understand its present fortunes and adversities and can be caught unawares in a fast changing world.

Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.

Learning from the experiences of our ancestors, let us together create knowledge for all that benefits all.

We must protect our history - because we are doomed to repeat it if we don't understand it and work towards a more perfect union.

Without understanding your history, you can't get a perspective about the present.

Both my parents worked. So it wasn't like the previous generation where we learned how to cook and bake from our mothers and grandmothers.

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

We want every generation to know a little something about TLC.

History lets you know exactly where you are today. And if you pay attention to it, it gives you a broad perspective of everyone. You can relate it to pretty much any time.

My generation knew pretty well what happened 50 years before our birth. Now I follow all the quiz programs because they are a paramount example of the span of memory of the young generation - they are able to remember everything that happened in their life but not before.

Each time one of the medicine men dies, it's as if a library has burned down.

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

The ancients knew something, which we seem to have forgotten.

One of the sad things, I think, about the younger generation, quite frankly, is they have less sense of yesterday. And if you don't know who you were, you don't really know who you are.

Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born is to be condemned to live as a child.

A necessary part of our intelligence is on the line as the oral tradition becomes less and less important. There was a time throughout our land when it was common for stories to be told and retold, a most valuable exercise, for the story retold is the story reexamined over and over again at different levels of intellectual and emotional growth.

There is but a slight difference between the man who may be said to know nothing and him who thinks he knows everything.

When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it beforewhy do we think we can succeed now?

The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it.

You can't know who you are, as a nation or a people, unless you know where you've been.