Robert Smithson Quotes

… history is that which transforms documents into monuments

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

History is the autobiography of a madman.

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

Every time we revise our history, we also revise the mythology of our history.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

History is always changing.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

The only thing that interests me is history - reviewing the past and making something out of it.

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity

Nothing changes more constantly than the past

History takes time... History makes memory.

Everybody rewrites history if he can.

History is what we would make of it.

History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead