Kate Williams Quotes

Not only the Archivist alone but all who work for NARA are designated custodians of America's national memory.

Libraries are public treasuries. They're ways in which well-meaning societies leave the wealth of the past arranged A to Z so that anyone walking past can find it.

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

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.

History written today is much more accurate than history written in the 18th century.

Kissinger's monopoly on this historical record has driven many scholars to distraction. Groups of lawyers, scholars, journalists and archivists have used pronunciamento, lawsuit, and other crowbars in a usually vain effort to open Kissinger's Library of Congress cache.

I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.

I have never met a document I don't like.

What's an archive, son? Is that anything like a closet?

I just love the days when you come out of the archives with half a dozen excellent descriptions or poignant accounts of personal experiences.

I applied for funding to embark on an overseas field trip in Iceland, and spent six weeks there happily holed up in the national archives, museums and libraries, sifting through ministerial and parish records, censuses, maps, microfilm, logs, and local histories.

The last time when I handed over information was in February or March 1949.

Libraries keep the records on behalf of all humanity. the unique and the absurd, the wise and the fragments of stupidity.

The concept of preserving history, collating full archives, making them as usable as possible so the public have access to them, I really feel that it allows the public an ability to engage with their own history.

Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.

History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.

That great dust-heap called “history.”

The illiterate leave few records.

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.

History depends always upon what, for one reason or another, has survived from earlier periods, particularly upon what was written down or pictured.

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.

… science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race....

The Woodruff Library Archives has done a phenomenal job archiving my son's materials.

The Puritans left behind so full a record of what they thought and did that scholars cannot resist the temptation to make the most of it.