Pete Hamill Quotes

There can be no history without archives.

What's an archive, son? Is that anything like a closet?

That great dust-heap called “history.”

… science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race....

Some archives and record offices are housed in your local museum or library; others have their own stand-alone building. Wherever they are, they are a treasure trove.

Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.

The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.

What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?

Newspapers are the second hand of history.

Obituaries were among my favorite to write because they have elements no other news stories have - a story from start to finish with a proper conclusion.

I don't think we have very good records about what they were thinking except, as I pointed out earlier today, that they did invent our political system.

I go through all of my old notebooks, and I put an X on every page when everything has been entered into the computer, and sometimes that takes 15 years. But eventually the notebooks are full of X's, and they're no good to me anymore.

For a brief time in the 1850s, the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) preserve every message that passed through their wires. Millions of telegrams - in fireproof safes. Imagine the possibilities for history!

We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on, because we didn't have records.

The last time when I handed over information was in February or March 1949.

Libraries keep the records on behalf of all humanity. the unique and the absurd, the wise and the fragments of stupidity.

I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.

I wish I could have 25,000 years of my personal family history documented in a very powerful computer or a CD-ROM that I could just pop in and my computer would never crash.

Not only the Archivist alone but all who work for NARA are designated custodians of America's national memory.

The illiterate leave few records.

We still have documents from the First World War that have not yet been declassified. I have no idea why. It boggles the mind.

Since human memory is short and does not suffice for a crowd of things, the authority of those who preceded our age, the divine emperors and kings, has decreed that those things were to be written down which the progress of fleeting time generally removes from the knowledge of men.

History written today is much more accurate than history written in the 18th century.

Before books, nothing got saved. We don’t know what the cavemen thought about caves even though they tried to write on the walls.