Thomas Hart Benton Quotes

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 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.

I really don’t make history; I preserve it.

History is a heavy thing everywhere.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

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

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

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.

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

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.

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

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

History matters.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them.

Art is how a culture records its life, how it poses questions for the next generation and how it will be remembered.

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.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

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

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.

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.

Civilizations are not remembered by their business people, their bankers or lawyers. They're remembered by the arts.