David Grimsted Quotes

Before books, nothing got saved. We don’t know what the cavemen thought about caves even though they tried to write on the walls.

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.

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

Writing preserves only the thought of literate peoples.

If there was a day that history was not recorded, then the history of one hundred days would be in peril.

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.

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

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.

It is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.

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.

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.

With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

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.

The historical phase of India began with the Muslim invasion. Muslims were India's first historians.

There can be no history without archives.

The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory

… history is that which transforms documents into monuments

It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many.

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.

For more than 1000 years our spiritual traditions and common values have been nurtured and begotten here. Today, as we restore the value of patriotism, historical memory and cultural tradition, we are seeking firmer bonds with Mount Athos.

History is obviously dependent on the evidence, and it's always amazing to me how much evidence there is.

It is important never to forget our history, but parts of our history are more appropriately displayed in museums, not on government property.