Jason Epstein Quotes

Civilizations are not remembered by their business people, their bankers or lawyers. They're remembered by the arts.

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

To the brains of our predecessors we owe all of our inheritance of civilization and culture.

History matters.

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

Empires dissolve and peoples disappear, song passes not away.

We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die but books never die.

It may not be art, but it is history.

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

History is a heavy thing everywhere.

A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.

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

Reading is essential to human life. When the last reader dies, humanity will be at an end.

Washington and Lincoln mean as much to us as any two men could mean to a civilization, a people, and age, but I told Mr. Coolidge when he dedicated this monument that this rock is being carved with a monument that will outlive our government.

I believe that culture begins in the cradle . . .To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.

The Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations have perished; Hammurabi, Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar are empty names; yet Babylonian mathematics is still interesting, and the Babylonian scale of 60 is still used in Astronomy.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with the superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levellers. They give to all, who faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

It is through art that we will prevail and we will endure. It lives on after us and defines us as people.

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.

The sage has one advantage: he is immortal. If this is not his century, many others will be.

The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.

Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me – and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world

I think we have to realize that Canada is not immortal; but, if it is going to go, let it go with a bang rather than a whimper.

My country has no history, only a past.