Peter L. Berger Quotes

Absolutely nothing is so important for a nation's culture as its language.

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book - a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.

Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.

Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library

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

Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.

If you're constantly being reminded of the ways in which your history and your narrative as a people were rooted in loss and decay, then you're in deep trouble. Once you make a certain kind of peace with the past, then you should be completely oriented towards speculation about the future.

Nothing which is harmonized by the bond of the Muse can be changed from its own to another language without destroying its sweetness

Librarians are not just gatekeepers to knowledge, they are what the American Indians used to call their special sages who preserved the oral legends of a tribe: dream keepers.

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

Music was the medium through which knowledge was passed from generation to generation.

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn.

If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children.

A love of tradition has never weakened a nation.

Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.

Jews took it very seriously to marry other Jews and repopulate the Jewish bloodline, and my father's generation gets very serious in my household when they're like, "You have to marry another Jew," because that's still kind of the mentality coming from the baby boomers. So I know that type of pressure.

We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.

John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community. I think of my family stories-Mother's in particular-how much I need them now, how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds die with them. The same could be said of each passing whale.

The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.