T Bone Burnett Quotes

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.

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.

The information that is passed from person to person and from generation to generation is the primary factor that gives humans a competitive advantage over other animals.

I think it is so important to pass down knowledge and information to younger generations.

I used to love to sit and listen to the old people talk about yesterday. There's a lot of good information there.

My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.

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.

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

And I remember most of what I know that is good and true and lasting has come not from scholars but from minstrels and gypsies.

Out of monuments, names, words proverbs ...and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.

In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition.

In undeveloped social groups, we find very little formal teaching and training. Savage groups mainly rely for instilling needed dispositions into the young upon the same sort of association which keeps adults loyal to their group. They have no special devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in connection with initiation ceremonies by which the youth are inducted into full social membership. For the most part, they depend upon children learning the customs of the adults, acquiring their emotional set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what the elders are doing.

Storytelling is the oldest form of education.

History is fond of her grandchildren, for it offers them the marrow of the bones, which the previous generation had hurt its hands in breaking.

What he learns from the government he writes on his tongue and we learn from him.

lessons must be learned anew by each succeeding generation, and that generation is fortunate indeed which learns from other than its own bitter experience.

History is merely gossip.

… ideas are structures built over time, each part added by a new generation.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think, since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids.

Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human.

I was brought up telling stories, when I was a kid, in the tiny village where I grew up. Storytelling was a tradition.

People used to grow up in small communities where folk wisdom was passed down. But we don't live there anymore. We can't go next door to your aunt and ask her for the answers.

My grandmother valued her Southern roots, folk culture, and healing.

I had mentors, growing up in gay life - older gay men who told me about our history and the history of art and culture - but somehow, the younger generation missed out on that synergy.