Elbert Hubbard Quotes

Things written, remain.

If I have done any deed worthy of remembrance, that deed will be my monument. If not, no monument can preserve my memory.

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

All records are not made to be broken.

Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.

But I think it's important that things endure.

I'm lucky. Usually you're dead to get your own museum, but I'm still alive to see mine.

The idea of trying to create things that last - forever knowledge - has guided my work for a long time now.

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

Behold, at this hour our moral history is being preserved for eternity. Processes are at work which will perpetuate our every act and word and thought.

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

History depends always upon what, for one reason or another, has survived from earlier periods, particularly upon what was written down or pictured.

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.

To think I thought you could lose your place in history.

I think all creative people are operating from the fear that, of the best of what they did, will anybody remember it? Will anybody tell stories about them? Will anybody keep those pictures on the mantle long after they are gone? It's why people write stories. It's peoples' grave markers.

How many other people get a chance to be remembered forever? And that's what I really want. I want to be remembered forever.

Washington and Lincoln mean as much to us as any two men could mean to a civilization, a people, and age, but I told Mr. Coolidge when he dedicated this monument that this rock is being carved with a monument that will outlive our government.

The second death. To think that you died and no one would remember you. I wondered if this was why we tried so hard to make our mark in America. To be known. Think of how important celebrity has become. We sing to get famous; expose our worst secrets to get famous; lose weight, eat bugs, even commit murder to get famous. Our young people post their deepest thoughts on public web sites. They run cameras from their bedrooms. It’s as if we are screaming Notice Me! Remember Me! Yet the notoriety barely lasts. Names quickly blur and in time are forgotten.

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.

We exist as long as somebody remembers us.

You wanna be remembered for making an impact and changing things.And I guess for the good or for the bad, it don't matter. But I guess you just wanna be remembered when it's all said and done.

It makes sense that that's part of the story and everything, but that's part of any story of any record - where was it record and how long and what were the people doing. I think people want to know where these events are made. That's why I like the word "record."

The men who make history have not time to write it.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.