Brian Setzer Quotes

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.

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

These places, and the ancient things you know, You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'

I grew up in a modern home, but my grandmother lived across the street in an old house that was built when churches were illegal in Mexico. She had a chapel in the home, right between the kitchen and dining room.

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.

Societies need heroes. So we travel to places where the revisionists cannot dismantle the great.

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

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.

I hope that memory is valued - that we do not lose memory.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

Preserving tradition has become a nice hobby, like stamp collecting.

One of the brilliant things about Britain is the way you've managed to save old things but to keep using them - that they've not just become museums the way they do in the United States.

I don't think you can separate a place from its history. I think a place is much more than the bricks and mortar that go into its construction. I think it's more than the accidental topography of the ground it stands on.

When the written and spoken word is censored, the urban landscape becomes a nation's only physical link to the past.

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.

Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.

I think archaeologists are stuck, and we are losing our past at a very rapid rate. Tens of thousands of sites will be lost, and we've only unveiled a tiny percent of the past.

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

I have a lot of cultural references that have amassed in my brain like shrapnel over the years that are meaningful to me.

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.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

It may not be art, but it is history.