Rhiannon Giddens Quotes

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 think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn't often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today.

I think that America has an obsession with history, really.

With each passing decade, history becomes less real for us, less immediate and essential to our way of life, and so, like 'green' nature, more of a commodity or an advertising gimmick.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

As artists, our primary function is not to be educators - but we are at a time in history, where for us, our history needs to give context for stories that we hope to tell down the road.

It's easier to make art for a society at a certain point in time with an understanding of what's going on.

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?

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

Most of us get our history through story.

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff well, it might as well be dead.

History must not be treated as something set off by itself.

It may not be art, but it is history.

The historian’s imperative has no teeth.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

History is simply man’s desperate bid to give substance to his most visionary dreams.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

The stories in our music form a special viewpoint on the story of America in the 20th Century.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite.

History after all is the true poetry.