Steve Berry Quotes

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

In charting our course to the future, we are mindful of our path from the past.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

The past has to inform the present.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

There's a need to keep the history of an artform going, parallel with the new work that's being done.

History provides no precise guidelines.

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

You cannot survive if you do not know the past.

Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.

History is the best guide to the future.

I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture.

I think my attitudes about the past are very traditional. You can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

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

For me to grow, I have to know about the foundation that came before.

Stability means respecting precedents.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

I believe in traditions; I believe in the idea of things being passed between generations and the slow transmission of cultural values through tradition.

Our understanding of Shakespeare already depends largely on the vitality of Renaissance elements in our education. Each man must live in his own generation, as the saying is; but the generations are bound together by the golden links of the great tradition of civilization.

History is fond of her grandchildren, for it offers them the marrow of the bones, which the previous generation had hurt its hands in breaking.