Virginia Woolf Quotes

I have thousands of tapes, and photos and fliers, letters, posters, artwork - basically everything that ever happened, I kept. I'm not a hoarder, though. I'm sort of a librarian.

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

I'm a hoarder. For me, documentation has always been key, and I've kept everything from my past.

If there was a day that history was not recorded, then the history of one hundred days would be in peril.

There can be no history without archives.

My observations are not bread crumbs. They do not dissolve. They are on record, on film printed in books, and found on the Internet. I am happy to share them. For this I was born.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'

I want this book to be facts, to be important, to be history.

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

Obama prefers to look forward, not back, as he has stated. So at least during his tenure, there will be no reliable record compiled as a cautionary tale for lawmakers and presidents in future times of crisis. This is the historical Obama.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

I've never kept a record of anything.

I have a strong impulse to protect history and time and the lineage of events.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

The people who make history are not the people who make it who are there but the people who make it and then write about it.

The way you 'take history' is also a way of 'making history.'

I write in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done.

The palest ink is better than the best memory.

Richard M. Nixon ... has a deeper concern for his place in history than for the people he governs. And history will not fail to note that fact.

It is therefore necessary that memorable things should he committed to writing, and not wholly betaken to slippery memory which seldom yields a certain reckoning.

Divining the future is a lot easier and cheaper than documenting the present.

Since human memory is short and does not suffice for a crowd of things, the authority of those who preceded our age, the divine emperors and kings, has decreed that those things were to be written down which the progress of fleeting time generally removes from the knowledge of men.