Quotes About Oral History

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. True combat power is arms multiplied by fighting spirit. If one of them is infinitely strong, you will succeed. - Asahi Shimbun newspaper, quoted in Japan at War: An Oral History

James D. Bradley

#4. 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

#5. The values transmitted through oral history are many - courage, selflessness, the ability to endure, and to do so with humor and grace. I got those values listening to my dad's stories about the Depression and how their family survived. It gave me courage that I, too, could survive hard times.

Ann Turner

#6. Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.

Niall Ferguson

#7. What I love about jazz is that it's full of legends, full of myths. It's an oral history because it started in New Orleans and Kansas City, under the radar.

Damien Chazelle

#8. The great sadness," Helms said in an oral history recorded for the LBJ Library, "was our ignorance - or innocence, if you like - which led us to mis-assess, not comprehend, and make a lot of wrong decisions.

Tim Weiner

#9. No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren't.

Gloria Steinem

#10. Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.

Neal Stephenson

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Don't tell me what's in the Red Book. I wrote the goddamned thing. And I know that it's a lot of crap.

Paul Martin

#14. The modern world is personal; people want to know intimate things.

Nigella Lawson

#15. In third grade, I had to an oral report on the state of Oregon. I brought up Big Foot sightings, and I remember there was an argument about whether or not Big Foot was valid history. Ever since then I've been thinking about how subjective history is.

Sufjan Stevens

#16. I wouldn't even go into the history of the last days of the Soviet Union, the withdrawal from Europe, and what promises were given at that time, because those were oral promises, and our leaders of that time strongly believe that, like in ancient Russia, a word given is better than any treaty.

Sergei Lavrov

#17. 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

#18. Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.

James Fenton

#19. All history was at first oral.

Samuel Johnson

#20. 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

#21. Since our yesterdays are gone and our tomorrows are never promised, TODAY I want to thank all my amazing friends and family for being in my life.

Steven Aitchison

#22. Oral tradition is practised in most African cultures: ideals, family histories and legacies are handed down from one generation to the other physically or verbally. However, this system is flawed in the sense that a lot of African innovation, experience and culture have been lost, undocumented.

Nana Awere Damoah

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. Well, there were plenty of things to do; there always were. There was no end to the wanting.

Terry Pratchett

#27. The tatters of old stories are tangled, weathered, muted by long-held silences that succeeded loud feuds, and sometimes no doubt re-dyed a more flattering color.

Sonia Sotomayor

#28. I think the evangelicals want to provoke an immense global disaster to precipitate the second coming of Christ.

Randall Robinson

#29. Hanging out is good historical methodology.

Jean Pfaelzer

#30. There are many ways to tell the history of the world. Oral histories that were later written down, including the Book of Genesis, the Rig Veda, and the Popul Vuh, focused especially on the actions of gods and on human/divine interactions. The

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

#31. I just want the bullying to stop. That is all I ever wanted. I used to love going to school. Now I hate it.

Tim Field