Savion Glover Quotes

So I feel now very much like a guardian. I'm standing in front of art. I'm standing in front of cinema. I'm standing in front of Black culture. I'm standing in front of the history of America, and I'm protecting it by making art, by protecting our art, and by promoting our art.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

Art shows and the institutions end up being the couriers for culture for the next generation and are an important component as well. It may seem ironic from one perspective, but I think if you look at my overall strategy, it's actually not out of step.

Tradition can, to be sure, participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself.

My work is as an ethnographic rescuer: a conduit between past and future generations. The urgency of this effort cannot be overstated.

So we have to be careful because if you don't protect your culture you won't have it for very long.

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

People tend to believe that to be modern you have to disengage from your heritage, but it's not true.

There are a lot of wonderful things created in our culture that have been ignored that can speak to them.

Myths are part of our DNA. We're a civilisation with a continuous culture. The effort to modernize it keeps it alive. Readers connect with it.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

In every country and region, there are practices and ways of living and culture that have been handed down from ancestors. Naturally, I feel that these should be respected.

I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.

I prefer to choose which traditions to keep and which to let go.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.

Tradition is the illusion of permanance.

Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

It’s very important that all of us who have bicultural roots retain our culture.