Henry James Sumner Maine Quotes

The earliest known writing probably emerged in southern Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, but for most of recorded history, reading and writing remained among the most elite human activities: the province of monarchs, priests and nobles who reserved for themselves the privilege of lasting words.

Before books, nothing got saved. We don’t know what the cavemen thought about caves even though they tried to write on the walls.

Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it, the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.

Writing preserves only the thought of literate peoples.

"For even the most childish intoxication with progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a function that is eternal. It will become evident that formulations in words and the handling on of these formulations through writing are not only important aids but actually the only means by which humanity can have a history and continuing consciousness of itself."

Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.

The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.

The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years.

A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; that's what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

It seems inevitable that the magic of the written word will fade.

In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.

We know the past and its great events, the present in its multitudinous complications, chiefly through faith in the testimony of others.

Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.

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

The cornerstone of education is an easy system of reading and writing. The hey to this is the new Turkish alphabet based on the Latin script.

The Egyptians had no Stone age, and were born civilized.

The United States is the only nation in the world whose entire culture was formed entirely in the age of print.

I often pick up papers and books which have all kinds of pictures and marks in them, but I cannot understand them as a white person does. They have a way of communicating by the use of written symbols and figures; but before they could do that, they had to have an understanding among themselves. You are learning that, and I was very much pleased to hear you are reading.

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.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all

I have very vivid memories of my mother reading to us as kids.

Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.