Wallace Stegner Quotes

I think that America has an obsession with history, really.

An accurate knowledge of the past of a country is necessary for everyone who would understand its present, and who desires to judge of its future.

With each passing decade, history becomes less real for us, less immediate and essential to our way of life, and so, like 'green' nature, more of a commodity or an advertising gimmick.

I think people in general have neglected to learn about history.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

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.

You can’t just wave a magic wand and make our history go away..

Too many people take New York for granted. The primary reason is that history is not taught. That's outrageous in a city where the past is still visible.

I work with history because I come from a country that has a tremendous thirst for reality.

My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.

We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.

To have a sense of history one must consider oneself a piece of history.

To collude in the minimisation of British history on the grounds of its imagined irrelevance to our rebranded national future, or from a suspicion that it does no more than recycle patriotic pieties unsuited to a global marketplace, would be an act of appallingly self-inflicted collective memory loss.

The history of this country is told by showing people who have contributed to it.

All states need to hallow themselves with the dignity of the past.

Awaken a feeling that our ancient buildings are not mere ecclesiastical toys, but sacred monuments of the nation's growth and hope.

The historian’s imperative has no teeth.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

History is an instrument of the most genuine patriotic spirit

The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world …. our proper function is not to repeat the past but to make use of it

There can be no dedication to Canada's future without a knowledge of its past.

A nation builds museums to understand its own history and to have its history understood by others, to create a common space and language to address collectively what is too difficult to process individually.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

History turns me on. I was terrible at it at in school, but as I get older, I get more and more into it.