Iris Chang Quotes

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.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them.

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

It may not be art, but it is history.

I like places that have history in the sense of - you feel responsible to it.

Ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to avoid change; they couldn't entirely do so, of course, but did preserve a cultural continuity for almost four thousand years.

We've got to map all of our ancient history before it's gone because, let's face it, if we don't have a common heritage to share, something to get excited about, then what are we living for?

A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory.

The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations.

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

Tradition is the illusion of permanance.

Malcolm was a firm believer in the value and importance of our heritage. He believed that we have valuable and distinct cultural traditions which need to be institutionalized so that they can be passed on to our heirs.

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

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.

The rites and festivals of each nation shall remain undisturbed and shall continue as before because they were given by the people of old times as useful and necessary for the good of men

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

Looting has an immense impact on our ability to understand our global cultural heritage; once these objects are gone, so too is our chance of piecing together humanity's shared story.

A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.

The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.

A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation.

Archaeology is not only the hand maid of history, it is also the conservator of art.

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

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

High among the unpredictable variables that endanger the survival of worthy buildings are the vagaries of taste.

We are the only ones who really can care about the preservation Foreigners who come to excavate, maybe some of them care about preservation, but the majority care about discoveries.