Catherine Opie Quotes

Historia (Inquiry); so that the actions of of people will not fade with time.

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

Students of American glass must always keep in mind that the creations they collect are truly examples of our American culture... and thus have historical significance.

It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history.

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.

I'm passionate about history and there's no more historic place than London. We're sitting on a thousand years of history and you can smell it as you're walking around the streets.

With sharpen'd sight pale Antiquaries pore, Th' inscription value, but the rust adore. This the blue varnish, that the green endears; The sacred rust of twice ten hundred years.

My art recognizes the human place, the human context - especially in Britain, which is a landscape so worked by people for thousands of years, written, deeply ingrained with the presence of people.

I love museums, and I think they're fantastic, but they don't touch the people who I frequently think need to be touched with at least some reminder of legacy.

The Ancient Egyptians were not fools, Carter. They built the pyramids. They created the first great nation state. Their civilization lasted thousands of years.” “Yeah,” I said. “And now they’re gone.

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.

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.

It blew my mind that this stuff had survived for two thousand, three thousand years.

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

People in the future look back on primitive machinery or technology or painting, and in some ways, it always seems amazingly intricate and finely wrought.

People need their history like they need air and food.

Jeremy Popkin's collection of first-person narratives of the Haitian Revolution is an extremely valuable work, accessible, sound and intelligent. I only wish such a book had been available fifteen years ago when I was in the early stages of researching my series of novels. Popkin has been deft and tactful in stitching together these excerpts, and as a result, he manages to tell a complete version of the Revolution almost entirely in the words of the people who experienced it-this book engaged me deeply.

A lot of people believe that you don't need to know the history and that creates newness. I disagree: we should always be informed and then destroy it.

We live in what virtually amounts to a museum - which does not happen to a lot of people.

Michael Jackson doesn't really belong on this planet. He's the most important figure in the history of music. He'll be remembered far longer than George Bush will. 200 years from now, people will be talking about Michael Jackson, and no one's going to mention George Bush.

By nature, I'm like a 90-year-old woman, so the whole internet and Twitter and Facebook, and all of that, I'm very new to. But, I am quite shocked at how much fun it is to be able to reach out to people, on a daily basis, and keep content out there, and how much it actually really does help promote things, in such a different way.

Libraries and museums are the DNA of our culture.

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

A people without the memories of heroic suffering and sacrifices are a people without a history.

I can't picture people talking about me 50 years from now.