Andy Rooney Quotes

Writing preserves only the thought of literate peoples.

History depends always upon what, for one reason or another, has survived from earlier periods, particularly upon what was written down or pictured.

Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.

Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it, the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'

Libraries keep the records on behalf of all humanity. the unique and the absurd, the wise and the fragments of stupidity.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

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

Most of us get our history through story.

Storytelling is as old as speech. It existed before humans first began to carve shapes in stones and press their hands upon the rocky walls of caves.

My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives' work, have not been preserved for posterity.

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.

If historians don't tell stories at the scales of creation myths, someone else will.

A great library contains the diary of the human race.

Since human memory is short and does not suffice for a crowd of things, the authority of those who preceded our age, the divine emperors and kings, has decreed that those things were to be written down which the progress of fleeting time generally removes from the knowledge of men.

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

Long before we created libraries, or even books, poetry was the way we humans remembered who we were, a primary means of documenting and contemplating our lives.

All history was at first oral.

Storytelling is how history is passed. It's what our ancestors did, it's what everybody's done. It has to come back into a story because otherwise, it's stuck in this book and it's boring and it's academic and I'm not against intelligence and I'm not against education, I don't want to be misunderstood, but we have tell the stories to our young people a little bit early and history gives us a lot of things.

I have nothing from my childhood. I think you carry those books with you. It's like in [Ray] Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." Books are outlawed in this future society so people become the book they love by memorizing it.

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.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

History can be formed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost forever.

Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle.