James Gleick Quotes

The concept of preserving history, collating full archives, making them as usable as possible so the public have access to them, I really feel that it allows the public an ability to engage with their own history.

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.

I'm a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.

I wish I could have 25,000 years of my personal family history documented in a very powerful computer or a CD-ROM that I could just pop in and my computer would never crash.

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

We still have documents from the First World War that have not yet been declassified. I have no idea why. It boggles the mind.

There can be no history without archives.

I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.

All history was at first oral.

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.

This I hold to be the chief office of history, to rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records would consign them, and that men should feel a dread of being considered infamous in the opinions of posterity, from their depraved expressions and base actions.

The past is a finite resource.

Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted,but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.

To reclaim our past and insist that it become a part of our human history is the task that lies before us. For the future requires that women, as well as men, shape the world destiny.

It is my belief that politicians should not be stepping into the realm of history. Rather, politicians should be taking a future-oriented perspective.

History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.

Well, there is something beautiful about ruins. I mean, in one sense it's not that different from going to Rome and looking at the Forum. But it's changing. It truly is. I'm optimistic but skeptical.

The men who make history have not time to write it.

History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page.

I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.

Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.

What's an archive, son? Is that anything like a closet?