30 Oral History Quotes

Following is our list of the most famous oral history quotations and slogans. We've compiled this selection of inspirational oral history quotes. Hopefully, these oral history quotes will keep you motivated not only during hard times but to expand your oral history knowledge!

More Oral History Quotes

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

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

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

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