Mark Plotkin Quotes

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

Each time someone dies, a library burns.

I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

From the beginning of time, we've told stories, Shamans and Medicine People, and not to be pompous about it, but I feel like that is the lineage I take down and where I come from. There is magic to storytelling.

Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors - the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

So many white kids, English kids - we had no culture.

The dead and past stories that I have told again in divers fashions, are not set down without authority.

Exploitation was rampant before statehood, and various factions actively tried to eradicate the roots of Hawaiian culture in the process of converting the natives to European religious beliefs. Some of the results can never be undone. We try to honor what is left.

You get people talking about being worried about their art, and dances... their culture being wiped out or taken over, and yet these same people are taking advantage of their people to use them as cheap labour.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

Languages and cultures are disappearing at an enormously fast rate, and many of them are in Canada. These are extreme examples of removal of freedom of expression - to actually lose a language and the ability to express that culture.

There is a history which has to be reversed, and that is the demolition of our temples.

My grandmother valued her Southern roots, folk culture, and healing.

The wisdom of our ancestors.

I acknowledge immense debt to the griots [tribal poets] of Africa - where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground.

Virtue is not a chemical product...it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key.

I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I'm watching it burn right to the ground.

There's a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man's art.

Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned....That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions.

It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past

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

A lot of native culture has been destroyed. So you already feel lost inside your culture. And then you add up feeling lost and insignificant inside the larger culture. So you end up feeling lost squared. And to never be recognized, to never have any power, you know, other minority communities actually have a lot of economic, cultural power.

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.