Utah Phillips Quotes

I think that everything I've ever done at some point is part of someone else's legacy.

An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

History is a heavy thing everywhere.

If you forget your history, you forget who you are.

We can never run away from our past. The past will catch up to us because it is us. It is a part of us; it's what makes us we are. It's what delineates the borders of our societies.

The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In our architecture, as in all our other arts-indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole-ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.

If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children.

Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.

The idea that all we have is everything that's come before us, and we are the accumulated weight of our own personal histories, is a beautiful concept. And yet it also leaves you asking, 'Is that all there is? Is that all that defines us? Is that all we have?'

History matters.

I know a lot of kids following in my footsteps, not only from my heritage, but there's younger generations trying to follow in my footsteps, so it's really cool just to be the start of something pretty special for our culture.

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

I feel I have a responsibility to carry out the immigrant story, since it's one that I hold very dear to my heart, since my story is similar in a lot of ways.

History is very much bound up in family experience.

The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.

The wisdom of our ancestors.

We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time--we often think they began with our arrival. That's not true.

But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.

My father always said, "You don't know who you are until you know where you came from." That's one thing I always remembered. The other thing that my family always taught me was respect and reputation. You always respect yourself.

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Remember Old Nan's stories, Bran. Remember the way she told them, the sound of her voice. So long as you do that, part of her will always be alive in you.