Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes

If we go back in the history of different nations, violence and the use of force are part of their heritage. These are the traditions of mankind.

I believe it is important for the university to always remember its roots.

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

Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization.

History is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books, and the compilers of magazine articles and TV programs.

We sometimes have a tendency to learn the lessons of recent history and convert them into articles of faith.

The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.

A university is a place where ancient tradition thrives alongside the most revolutionary ideas. Perhaps as no other institution, a university is simultaneously committed to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow.

It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. ... Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.

Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle.

We measure our presence in generations; we cannot dig down ten thousand years and find our bones. Our arrival is scribed upon the line of history; it does not drift upon the winds of story, or float upon the shrouds of myth. We are still explorers and discoverers, seeking meaning through movement and examination. But we are coming to a time of listening. Our sweat and breath are now upon this land. Voices rise up, and we begin to hear the echoes in the stones.

...and our footsteps rang and echoed till it sounded like the room was full of dancers, the house calling up all the people who had danced here across centuries of spring evenings, gallant girls seeing gallant boys off to war, old men and women straight-backed while outside their world disintegrated and the new one battered at their doors, all of them bruised and all of them laughing, welcoming us into their long lineage.

The raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years.

Storytelling is the oldest form of education.

Language is the archives of history.

All tradition is merely the past.

The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.

It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions.

Cities are beautiful because they are created slowly; they are made by time. A city is born from a tangle of monuments and infrastructures , culture and market, national history and everyday stories. It takes 500 years to create a city, 50 to create a neighborhood.

The Indian wars have never ended in the Americas.

Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together!

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

First ladies throughout our history have been expected to be adoring wives and perfect mothers.

The people in Coming of Age were far less curmudgeonly than you would think. The greater percentage said that without the young we'd be lost. One woman, a former Southern belle, now 87, a philanthropist, says, "Well, these young, their history's been stolen from them. And what have we done to make them respect us?"

Powder is but a thing of yesterday, and war is as old as the human race--unhappily.