Historical Value Quotes

There are three things to leave behind; your photographs, your library, and your personal journals. These things are certainly going to be more valuable to future generations than your furniture!

The James Brown story is not about James Brown. It's about who's getting paid, whose interest is involved, who can squeeze the estate and black history for more.

Antiques Roadshow' is a public service. It reflects the nation back to itself, as does 'Question Time.'

I think every period - except for the 14th century, or something - has some merits.

Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.

If knowing history made you rich, librarians would be billionaires.

I'm not really frightened by experimenting - that's the main thing. I really like mixing very old beautiful pieces that are from thrift shops or that have some historical value with quite new futuristic things.

I did not say history was bunk. It was bunk to me . . I did not need it very bad.

Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them, like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value; and the precious particles are generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation is a task of the utmost difficulty.

A great man is a gift, in some measure a revelation of God. A great man, living for high ends, is the divinest thing that can be seen on earth. The value and interest of history are derived chiefly from the lives and services of the eminent men whom it commemorates. Indeed, without these, there would be no such thing as history, and the progress of a nation would be little worth recording, as the march of a trading caravan across a desert.

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

The woodchopper reads the wisdom of the ages recorded on the paper that holds his dinner, then lights his pipe with it. When we ask for a scrap of paper for the most trivial use, it may have the confessions of Augustine or the sonnets of Shakespeare, and we not observe it. The student kindles his fire, the editor packs his trunk, the sportsman loads his gun, the traveler wraps his dinner, the Irishman papers his shanty, the schoolboy peppers the plastering, the belle pins up her hair, with the printed thoughts of men.

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.

Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.

One day we're going to look back at $1,700 with nostalgia. People are going to be shocked at how inexpensive gold was when it could be snapped up for such a bargain price.

On the whole, however, the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, safely be relied on. Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth's expense; the subjects they treat of being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend.

History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

The Gen X thinks history is a waste of time. This is instant world where only readymade things are valued.

Gold has worked down from Alexander's time... When something holds good for two thousand years I do not believe it can be so because of prejudice or mistaken theory.

To see this place would truly be worth a trip to India in itself, and from the spirit of the religion that lived here one can learn more in an hour of viewing than from all the books ever written.

This above all makes history useful and desirable: it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.

The rich are always enamored of the ancient.

If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time; it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price.

Mere recording of an event will not make it a historical document. It will become obsolete with time. Only those that emotionally connect with the audience will stand the test of time.

Apothegms are in history, the same as pearls in the sand, or gold in the mine.