People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel — Studs Terkel
The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories. — P. L. Travers
Rap comes from the oral tradition. The oral tradition gives voice to those who would've otherwise been voiceless. — Benjamin Zephaniah
If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten. — Rudyard Kipling
The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself. — Augustus
We need to haunt the house of history and listen anew to the ancestors' wisdom. — Maya Angelou
So much history can be lost if no one tells the story -- so that's what I do. I tell the stories. This is my way of fighting for social change. — Alanis Obomsawin
The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them. — Czeslaw Milosz
Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word. — Simone Weil
History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn. — Edmund Burke
Tradition usually rests upon something which men did know; history is often the manufacture of the mere liar. — Jefferson Davis
History is the ship carrying living memories to the future. — Stephen Spender
History is not a catalogue but...a convincing version of events. — A. J. P. Taylor
What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past. — Terri Windling
History Quotes
The truth is the greatest enemy of the State. — Unknown Author
History teaches us that unity is strength, and cautions us to submerge and overcome our differences in the quest for common goals, to strive, with all our combined strength, for the path to true African brotherhood and unity. — Haile Selassie
Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph. — Haile Selassie
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That's why we call it present.
A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots. — Marcus Garvey
No real change in history has ever been achieved by discussions. — Subhas Chandra Bose
Condemn me, it does not matter: history will absolve me. — Fidel Castro
Surround yourself with people whose definition of you is not based on your history, but your destiny. — T. D. Jakes
Donald Trump is obviously the most pro-gay candidate in American electoral history. — Milo Yiannopoulos
Throughout history many nations have suffered a physical defeat, but that has never marked the end of a nation. But when a nation has become the victim of a psychological defeat, then that marks the end of a nation. — Ibn Khaldun
Us History Quotes
You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once but don't ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own. — Michelle Obama
We have nothing to fear for the future, except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us, and His teaching in our past history. — Ellen G. White
Education is useless without the Bible. The Bible was America's basic text book in all fields. God's Word, contained in the Bible, has furnished all necessary rules to direct our conduct. — Noah Webster
Yesterday is a history; Tomorrow a mystery; Today is a gift; That's why we call it the present
We have a wonderful history behind us. ... If you are unable to demonstrate to the world that you have this record, the world will say to you, 'You are not worthy to enjoy the blessings of democracy or anything else'. — Carter G. Woodson
Don't be a marshmallow. Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk. Stop being vegetables. Work for Justice. Viva the boycott! — Dolores Huerta
The colonists usually say that it was they who brought us into history: today we show that this is not so. They made us leave history, our history, to follow them, right at the back, to follow the progress of their history. — Amilcar Cabral
Don’t let your history interfere with your destiny.
Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk. — Dolores Huerta
The conqueror writes history, they came, they conquered and they write. You don't expect the people who came to invade us to tell the truth about us. — Miriam Makeba
Before the war it was always the United States *are*, after the war it was the United States is... it made us an is. — Shelby Foote
If you don't recount your family history, it will be lost. Honor your own stories and tell them too. The tales may not seem very important, but they are what binds families and makes each of us who we are. — Madeleine L'Engle
Art History Quotes
After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture. — Jeffrey Deitch
Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves -- or desires. — Jacquetta Hawkes
How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions? — Polly Toynbee
I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years. — David Rockefeller
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is. — David McCullough
Live out of your imagination, not your history.
Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world. — Dave Barry
Beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. — Oscar Wilde
The study of History is the beginning of wisdom. — Jean Bodin
That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead. — Samuel Beckett
History Books Quotes
All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing. — Moliere
We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre. — Dick Gregory
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent. — Henry David Thoreau
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, today is a gift.
Short-term thinkers are a dime a dozen. Long-term thinkers are extremely rare. History books favor the long-term thinkers. Don't let short-term attention distract you from your long-term vision becoming a reality. Chase the big. — Patrick Bet-David
Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past. — Margaret Thatcher
The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history. — Noam Chomsky
The theory that religion is a force for peace, does not fits the facts of it's history.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. — Barbara Tuchman
My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history. — Ellen Tauscher
Thanks to history books, I have realised that people over the years have been dying of war, and that enabled me to realise that there is nothing stupid like war. — Kamal Haasan
For 179 years [The Book of Mormon] has been examined and attacked, denied and deconstructed, targeted and torn apart like perhaps no other religious history – perhaps like no other book in any religious history- and still, it stands. — Jeffrey R. Holland
Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere. — Adrienne Rich
Admittedly, key archival documentation remains under lock and key and will be inaccessible for a long time to come. But enough material is available, in the form of declassified documents, memoirs, oral histories and journalistic treatments, to begin to piece together the story. — Fredrik Logevall
We have a tradition of passing our history orally and singing a lot of it and writing songs about it and there's kind of a calling in Irish voices when they're singing in their Irish accent. — Sinead O'Connor
Don't let your history interfere with your destiny.
When you're missing your two front teeth, that's honesty. That is a door to your oral history. You're not covering anything up. You're saying, 'Hey world, I'm missing my front teeth. I'm gross; I'm dirty; I'm poor. I clearly have no problem with public urination and eating garbage. Don't come near me, I'll gum you to death! — Iliza Shlesinger
I'm called an oral historian, which is something of a joke. Oral history was here long before the pen, long before Gutenberg and the printing press. The difference is I have a tape recorder in my hand. — Studs Terkel
Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to. — Niall Ferguson
If you're someone who genuinely believes that women don't deserve or aren't as much as men, you're like the plague. On the big history chart, you're the plague... It's just pointless and deadly.
For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world. — Angela Carter
The Veteran's History Project, a nationwide volunteer effort to collect oral histories from America's war veterans, provides an avenue to do just that. Now in its fifth year, the Project has collected more than 40,000 individual stories. — Spencer Bachus
Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
As audiences, when we are exposed to oral history projects not only do we learn but in some ways we also bear witness to that which we have not experienced personally. — Patricia Leavy
Oral history interviews allow us to document and chronicle people's stories; stories that might otherwise not be included in the historical record. — Patricia Leavy
Twentieth century history of Christianity will name Oral Roberts as the voice that brought the Pentecostal movement to be taken seriously by mainline Christianity. — Robert H. Schuller
I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written. — Saul Williams
The facts of history have been too well rehearsed (I'm speaking needless to say not of written history but the oral kind that goes on in you without your having to do anything about it). . . — John Ashbery
I'm also developing my own narrative, because I'm the son of a widow. And so, while working with women and gathering their oral histories, I'm taking a step back to do my own art book and visual work. — Chath Piersath
I'm doing a collaborative project with another artist, Mary Hamill. My project is to gather the oral history of war widows, starting with the women of my village, Kop Nymit. — Chath Piersath
Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history. — Neal Stephenson
But you have to understand what that really did is that it opened these DVDs to be sources of oral history instead of puff pieces for the studio, because people involved with them being in fear of being sued by somebody, so it became another form of movie history. I mean I didn't plan it, but I'm proud that it happened. Which is probably why they didn't interview me for this DVD. — Nicholas Meyer
There are many important books on oral history. My book was the launch title in the Understanding Qualitative Research series with Oxford University Press. I think what makes my book and all of the series books unique is the emphasis on writing instruction for researchers who want to use the method being described. — Patricia Leavy
Moreover, it is so important that people have the opportunity to share their stories and have them documented. There have been large-scale oral history projects after many events, from September 11th to Hurricane Katrina. Many oral history projects are much more confined, but equally valuable. We can learn about different working conditions, living conditions, trauma experiences and much more through oral history. — Patricia Leavy
My book, Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research is about how researchers use this method and how to write up their oral history projects so that audiences can read them. It's important that researchers have many different tools available to study people's lives and the cultures we live in. I think oral history is a most needed and uniquely important strategy. — Patricia Leavy
Oral history is a research method. It is a way of conducting long, highly detailed interviews with people about their life experiences, often in multiple interview sessions. Oral history allows the person being interviewed to use their own language to talk about events in their life and the method is used by researchers in different fields like history, anthropology and sociology. — Patricia Leavy
One important part of historical recording is to get people of another generation to understand the feelings, the passion that went into social transformation. That's why oral history is so valuable. — Alix Kates Shulman
After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I'd read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers--especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it. — Mary Blakely
We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable. — Adrienne Rich
Although it is tempting to imagine an ancient era innocent of biochemical weaponry, in fact this Pandora's box of horrors was opened thousands of years ago. The history of making war with biological weapons begins in mythology, in ancient oral traditions that preserved records of actual events and ideas of the era before the invention of written histories. — Adrienne Mayor
All history was at first oral. — Samuel Johnson
The mixture of the oral and the written traditions in the writings of Plato enabled him to dominate the history of the West. — Harold Innis
The Bible is not primarily a written or printed text to be scrutinized in private, in a scholar's study or a contemplative cell. It is a body of oral messages, announcements, prophecies, promulgations, recitals, histories, songs of praise, lamentations, etc., which are meant either to be uttered or at least read aloud, or chanted, or sung, or recited in a community convoked for the purpose of a living celebration. — Thomas Merton
I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories. — Ron Rash
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of oral history quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about oral history to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of oral history quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
