Quotes about archives

A collection of quotes on the topic of archives, likeness, use, time.

Quotes about archives

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Source: As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

Truth

“It takes thousands of them to create an archive of human wisdom; only one to set a torch to it. Wouldn’t you have to say, then, that the work of the librarians is more typical of mortal behavior than the work of the arsonist?”

Kage Baker book The Children of the Company

Source: The Children of the Company (2005), Chapter 2, “Victor the Poisoner” (p. 89)

Wisdom, Behavior

“Love is what we learn on the brink,
after we've archived all our inherited
and acquired science. Love begins late.”

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987) Brazilian poet

Amor é o que se aprende no limite,
depois de se arquivar toda a ciência
herdada, ouvida. Amor começa tarde.
"Amor e seu tempo" ["The Time of Love"]
As Impurezas do Branco [Impurities of White] (1973)

Love, Learning, Science

“…A column is not merely a round stick of stone: it is part of an entire symbolic system, which one cannot intuit simply by looking at it in isolation. The basic reason for studying such things is not merely technical or archivally historical but humanistic; it is to seek out the answer to what someone like Vitruvius meant by his (to us) mysterious comment that "a building should have the proportions of a man,"”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Study, Parting

“There have always been two aspects to my work: formal innovation and strong content. That goes for Steve’s tape pieces as well. To make a work together, we had to be engaged by the subject matter, and we shared an interest in technology as it has advanced. Looking back at the Hindenburg and Bikini Atoll, and forward in “Dolly” to new technologies, was a way of rethinking and understanding the soup in which we swim. We call this a theater of ideas, but its success as a work depends on the strength of the video and the music.
“Hindenburg” itself begins with the crash of the zeppelin in 1937 and ends with a view of its burnt-up carcass on the landing field in Lakehurst, New Jersey, taken from an airplane. What interested us here in viewing the archival material and listening to recordings of the period was the overwhelming conviction that technology was the sure way to progress. Naturally, after the atom bomb, a darker view of progress began to appear.”

Beryl Korot (1945) American artist

Beryl Korot, in: " Steve Reich and Beryl Korot by Julia Wolfe http://bombmagazine.org/article/2521/steve-reich-and-beryl-korot," BOMB 81, Fall 2002

Music, Way, Idea, Understanding

“[Rwanda’s Untold Story] marks an important, informative, and decisive break from the now-more-than 20 years of false and propagandistic storytelling in the Anglo-American world that has buried the real history of the period. Both the BBC 2’s This World and the documentary’s production staff deserve their audience’s gratitude - not condemnation. […] We have seen that the 38 have a penchant for slander as well as straightforward misrepresentation. It is for committing the grave intellectual and moral crime of providing an alternative but, we believe, entirely credible and evidence-based reinterpretations of what really happened in Rwanda in 1994 that the 38 would like Rwanda’s Untold Story expunged from the BBC archives and its production team sent to the woodshed.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Peterson and Herman, “The Kagame-Power Lobby’s Dishonest Attack on the BBC 2’s Documentary on Rwanda” https://mronline.org/2014/11/01/hp011114-html-2/, MR Online, November 1, 2014. <br class="br">2010s

World, History, Decision, Falseness

“Papers relating to O'Donovan Rossa and the Fenians are housed in the Archives of The Catholic University of America, American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, Washington, D. C.”

Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa (1831–1915) Irish Republican Brotherhood member

References

History, Universe, Housing

“As I search the archives of my memory I seem to discern six types or methods which divide themselves from one another with measurable distinctness. There is the type magisterial or imperative; the type laconic or sententious; the type conversational or homely; the type refined or artificial, smelling of the lamp, verging at times upon preciosity or euphuism; the demonstrative or persuasive; and finally the type tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and the pastepot which are its implements and emblem.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge

On types of judicial writing, in "Law and Literature" in Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses (1931), p. 10
Other writings

Home, Search, Memory, Time

“Eissler's rage knew no bounds. He did not like being harrassed by other analysts. "Just today Masud Khan called me from London and asked me to dismiss you from the Archives. The board members, all of them, or at least most of them, are asking for the same."”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: Final Analysis (1990), p. 194

Rage

“The final verdict will not be in the obituaries. The final verdict will be when the PhD students dig out the archives, read my old papers, assess what my enemies have said, sift the evidence and seek the truth. I'm not saying that everything I did was right, but everything I did was for an honourable purpose”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Interview with the New York Times, September 2010 http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/20100920006/transcript_of_minister_mentor_lee_kuan_yew.pdf <br class="br">2010s

Truth, Reading

“For a language is really alive only as long as there is someone to speak it to. When you are the only one left, your knowledge of your language is like a repository, or archive, of your people’s spoken linguistic past. If the language has never been written down, or recorded on tape—and there are still many which have not—it is all there is. But, unlike the normal idea of an archive, which continues to exist long after the archivist is dead, the moment the last speaker of an unwritten or unrecorded language dies, the archive disappears for ever. When a language dies which has never been recorded in some way, it is as if it has never been.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 2

People, Way, Idea, Knowledge

“Language is the archives of history … Language is fossil poetry.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Music

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), The Poet

History

“The place was part museum, part library, and part archive; I loved it at first sight…and smell, for here there were thousands of printed books, many very old indeed, and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.”

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 32 (p. 269)

Love, Books, Parting

“A language is said to be dead when no one speaks it any more. It may continue to have existence in a recorded form, of course-traditionally in writing, more recently as part of a sound or video archive (and it does in a sense `live on’ in this way) – but unless it has fluent speakers one would not talk of it as a `living language’. And as speakers cannot demonstrate their fluency if they have no one to talk to, a language is effectively dead when there is only one speaker left, with no member of the younger generation interested in learning it. But what do we say if there are two speakers left, or 20, or 200? How many speakers guarantee life for a language?”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 11

Life, Way, Sense, Learning

“Certainly, for a newspaper director, to have within arm's reach a Travaglio, about whom every starring actor, supporting cast and extra of Italian political life he is ready upon cold request to provide an inquiry brief refined in the most minute details is a nice comfort. But also a bit unsettling. The day I asked him if in that archive, into which no one is allowed to stick their nose, there were a brief with my name on it, Marco changed the subject.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

Preface to Il Pollaio delle Libertà by Marco Travaglio, Vallecchi, 1995.
1950s - 1990s

Life, Star, Support, Change

“I called Anna Freud in London to tell her what was about to happen. It was a strange, honest conversation.
"Miss Freud, I am sure you have heard that Dr. Eissler is going to fire me from the Archives."
"Yes. And I disagree with him. I did not like that second article in the New York Times. And I think you are wrong in your views. But I do not see why you should be so severely punished for holding them. On one point, however, I feel that I was deceived by Dr. Eissler. He never told me that you were going to live in my house. My understanding was that you were to be in charge of the library and of the research, but not actually live in the house." I never did find out why Eissler never explained this to Anna Freud. Perhaps he was being discreet, not wanting to bring up the matter of her death, or perhaps he knew she would not like the idea of my living in the house. Of course, as things turned out, I never did live in the Freud house.
"Did the idea of my living in your house upset you?"
"Frankly, yes it did."
"Why?"
"Because my father would not have wanted it."
"You mean he would not have liked me?"
"I am not saying that. But he would not have wanted somebody like you living in the house. He would have wanted somebody quiet, modest, unobtrusive. You would have been everywhere, searching for everything, going through boxes, drawers, closets, bringing people in, opening things up. My father would not have wanted this." She was right.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: Final Analysis (1990), pp. 196-197

Death, People, Feeling, Search

“We've watched the Homo Sapiens interest group since the first appearance of the Blight. Where is this "Earth" the humans claim to be from? "Half way around the galaxy," they say, and deep in the Slow Zone. Even their proximate origin, Nyjora, is conveniently in the Slowness. We see an alternative theory: Sometime, maybe further back than the last consistent archives, there was a battle between Powers. The blueprint for this "human race" was written, complete with communication interfaces. Long after the original contestants and their stories had vanished, this race happened to get in position where it could Transcend. And that Transcending was tailor-made, too, re-establishing the Power that had set the trap to begin with.We're not sure of the details, but a scenario such as this is inevitable. What we must do is also clear. Straumli Realm is at the heart of the Blight, obviously beyond all attack. But there are other human colonies. We ask the Net to help in identifying all of them. We ourselves are not a large civilization, but we would be happy to coordinate the information gathering, and the military action that is required to prevent the Blight's spread in the Middle Beyond. For nearly seventeen weeks, we've been calling for action. Had you listened in the beginning, a concerted strike might have been sufficient to destroy the Straumli Realm. Isn't the Fall of Relay enough to wake you up? Friends, if we act together we still have a chance.Death to vermin.”

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1st edition)

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), p. 245.

Way, Communication, Appearance, Help

“Science Fiction Gods; Do they take much of an interest in us? I doubt it. How much entertainment does an ant's nest provide you with?
'Adepticus Sir, that bunch of Ornithoids on Artoc 4 that you asked me to observe, well they've just trashed their planet.'
'Oh that is a pity Initiatus Jones. What was it this time, ecological screw up or nuclear winter?'
'Worse than that sir, i looks lke they were mucking around with vacuum energy without having first invented the Mobius sphere.'
'Ah yes, the old classic mistake, we loose a few like that.'
'Could we not have tipped them off about it Sir?'
'I'm afraid not Jones, stupidity must remain its own reward, it's regrettable but there you are. Did you salvage anything?'
'They composed some fairly good poetry a couple of centuries ago, and some rather fine cloud sculptures fairly recently, I've logged some records in the archives.'
'Splendid Jones, I'll peruse them this evening. What about those Apes on Sol 3, how are they getting on?'
'Quit a bit of warfare as usual Sir, mostly based on chemical explosives these days, but with the occasional use of plutonium. Many of them have developed a belief in a big bang theory, and they reckon that they have the maths to prove it.'
'Really? Smith in anthropology will probably find that hilarious, I'm sure she would appreciate the data. It was one of her old Stomping grounds you know?'
'No I didnt know that Sir'
'It was a long time ago Jones, and a bit of a fiasco actually, she gave them a piece of her mind about some of their barbaric behavior which then abruptly became worse. Ever since then they have been obsessed with the number plate on her craft, it read 'JHVH'. The department gave her a desk job after that.”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

Source: The Apophenion (2008), p. 107-108

God, Stupidity, Behavior, Science

“The areas traditionally concerned with such systems are: publishing in all its ramification, librarianship, bibliography, documentation, record management, archives and the like. Systematic study of the activities in all these areas has lead to increased recognition of their common features. They are all concerned with information systems, and their study may include in the wider field of 'information science and technology' (as the Americans put it) or 'informatics”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

as Soviet writers would have it
Preface: second paragraph
Information Systems (1973)

Study, Science

“Chief Justice Sir Louis Davies – “the best debater the House of Commons has ever known.” (Mackenzie's newspaper scrapbook "Days of Giants", Library and Archives Canada)”

Alexander Mackenzie (1822–1892) 2nd Prime Minister of Canada

His Character

Justice, Housing

“There is no foundational mathematical or physical reason the relationship between Pythagorean and tempered western music should exist. It just does. The rich flexibility of the tempered scale and the … bountiful archives of western music are a testimonial to this wonderful coincidence provided by nature.”

Robert J. Marks II (1950) American electrical engineering researcher and intelligent design advocate

"Handbook of Fourier Analysis and Its Applications" (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 623, Robert J. Marks II, 2009, 2011-04-29 http://books.google.com/books?id=Sp7O4bocjPAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Handbook+of+Fourier+Analysis+and+Its+Applications&hl=en&ei=wcm5TaPvJYba0QHYi7nRDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false,

Music, Mathematics, Nature

“It was in the dust of the seigneurial archives that I discovered the frightful mysteries of the usurpations of the noble caste.”

François-Noël Babeuf (1760–1797) French political agitator and journalist of the French Revolutionary period

Ce fut dans la poussière des archives seigneuriales que je découvris les affreux mystères des usurpations de la caste noble.
[in Gracchus Babeuf avec les Egaux, Jean-Marc Shiappa, Les éditions ouvrières, 1991, 16, 27082 2892-7]
On feudalism

“It is the rare person who can stand aside and observe that our minds and identities are largely constructs of our social order, that we are abstract and arbitrary collections of ideas that resemble dusty archives in the galleries of a museum, visited by nobody, and maintained by a series of those insensible robots that are our habits.”

Justina Robson book Natural History

Source: Natural History (2003), Chapter 25 “Tom Who Built the Aeroplane” (pp. 254-255)

Idea, Personality

“Extract from The Abolition of the Slave Trade quoted in a letter: "To The Editor Of The Times." Times [London, England] 30 Apr. 1810: 2. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 16 Nov. 2012.”

Elizabeth Benger (1775–1827) British writer

Quotes, Time

“I am not far from believing that, in our own societies, history has replaced mythology and fulfils the same function, that for societies without writing and without archives the aim of mythology is to ensure that as closely as possible—complete closeness is obviously impossible—the future will remain faithful to the present and to the past.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) French anthropologist and ethnologist

Source: Myth and Meaning (1978), Chapter 4 : When Myth Becomes History

Faith, History, Past, Future

“More important than what I think about Hitler’s performance as a soldier during the war is what the other members of Hitler’s unit thought of him. A letter I found through serendipity in the US National Archives testifies that frontline soldiers in the trenches considered Hitler an Etappenschwein (‘rear area pig’), as they thought that, unlike them, he had landed a cushy job with regimental HQ a few miles behind the front. The reason this is so important is because it puts a lie to the orthodox view that Hitler was a typical product of his wartime unit.”

Thomas Weber (historian) (1974) German historian

Paul Lay, “Interview: Thomas Weber on Hitler's First War", History Today, 22nd September 2011, http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2011/09/interview-thomas-weber-hitlers-first-war

War, Lie, Thinking

“So whether information represents one man's sentimental archive, the accumulating knowledge base of the human-machine civilization, or the mind files stored in our brains, what can we conclude about the ultimate longevity of software? The answer is simply this: Information lasts only so long as someone cares about it. The conclusion that I've come […] is that there is no set of hardware and software standards existing today, nor any likely to come along, that will provide any reasonable level of confidence that the stored information will still be accessible […] decades from now.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

Source: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), p. 329

Confidence, Knowledge

“Heroes have filled the zodiac of beneficent labors, and then given up their mortal part to the fire without a murmur. Sages and lawgivers have bent their whole nature to the search for truth, and thought themselves happy if they could buy, with the sacrifice of all temporal ease and pleasure, one seed for the future Eden. Poets and priests have strung the lyre with heart-strings, poured out their best blood upon the altar which, reare'd anew from age to age, shall at last sustain the flame which rises to highest heaven. What shall we say of those who, if not so directly, or so consciously, in connection with the central truth, yet, led and fashioned by a divine instinct, serve no less to develop and interpret the open secret of love passing into life, the divine energy creating for the purpose of happiness; — of the artist, whose hand, drawn by a preexistent harmony to a certain medium, moulds it to expressions of life more highly and completely organized than are seen elsewhere, and, by carrying out the intention of nature, reveals her meaning to those who are not yet sufficiently matured to divine it; of the philosopher, who listens steadily for causes, and, from those obvious, infers those yet unknown; of the historian, who, in faith that all events must have their reason and their aim, records them, and lays up archives from which the youth of prophets may be fed. The man of science dissects the statement, verifies the facts, and demonstrates connection even where he cannot its purpose·”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Love, Life, Pleasure, Truth

“No, Travaglio kills no one. With a knife. He uses a weapon much more refined and unendictable in court: the archive.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

cited in Marco Travaglio, Montanelli e il Cavaliere: storia di un grande e di un piccolo uomo.
2000s - 2010s

“Our memory is like that burning scrap of paper. We use it to light up the past. First of all our own, and then we ask old people to tell us what they remember. After that we look for letters written by people who are already dead. And in this way we light our way back. There are buildings that are just for storing old scraps of paper that people once wrote on – they are called archives. In them you can find letters written hundreds of years ago. In an archive, I once found a letter which just said: 'Dear Mummy, Dear Mummy, Yesterday we ate some lovely truffles, love from William.”

Ernst Gombrich book A Little History of the World

William was a little Italian prince who lived four hundred years ago.
Source: A Little History of the World (2005), p. 2.

Love, People, Way, Light

“Ferenczi was considered paranoid for believing his women patients; the men's confessions were not even discussed. Ernest Jones, the powerful English analyst who had been Ferenczi's analysand, now took up the cudgel against him in deadly seriousness. Jones let it be known after Ferenczi's death in 1933 (he died a few months after the quarrel with Freud) that he was really a homicidal maniac. While I was in London working in the Jones archives I discovered what this really meant: Jones believed that to disagree with Freud (the father) was tantamount to patricide (father murder). And so, because Ferenczi believed that children were sexually abused and Freud did not, Ferenczi was branded by Jones as a homicidal maniac, and this piece of scurrilous interpretation stuck.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: Final Analysis (1990), p. 152

Death, Women, Men, Children

“Having read all the other works on the same subject, including M. Rumilly's recently published effort; having spent innumerable days and evenings in the dusty and poorly-illuminated archival chaos of Maurice Duplessis's basement, and having conscientiously revised the original version of this thesis in conformity with many objections, some of which were uninformed and unjust, I am unpretentiously conscious of presenting herewith the definitive work in its field, in any language.”

Conrad Black (1944) Canadian-born newspaper publisher

on submitting his revised MA dissertation in history to the faculty of Université Laval
The Establishment Man by Peter Newman

Effort, Reading

“There's nothing I enjoy more than sitting down with a big piece of marmite on toast and reading through the archives of a good webcomic. The only problem is that the good webcomics are all hidden behind pile upon pile of testicle sweat masquerading as entertainment.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

The Only Good Comics on the Internet
Fully Ramblomatic, Features

Problem, Reading

“With one exception, the following quotes are taken directly from archival footage shot by VRS military cameramen. The arrival of the Bosnian Serb army is covered, as well as their subsequent rush to Potočari, the site of the Dutch base where tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim refugees had taken cover, seeking protection from the United Nations.”

Ratko Mladić (1943) Commander of the Bosnian Serb military

Krle, Krstić, come on. Record that flag. Tear that flag down so it doesn't fly any more. Pull it down. Bravo! Towards Potočari! Towards Potočari and Bratunac! Don't stop, come on! Go in front of me the whole way, come on. Come on, boys, forward!
Here we are, on the eleventh of July of the year 1995, in Serbian Srebrenica. On the eve of yet another great Serb holiday we present this town as a gift to the Serb nation. The moment has finally arrived that, after the revolt against the Dahijas, we will have vengeance against the turks in this place."
There are so many! It is going to be a feast. There will be blood up to your knees. Nedzida Sadikovic, as quoted by Roy Gutman, Newsday News Service, August 9, 1995.
"Don't be afraid of anything, just take it easy, easy. Let the women and children go first. Thirty buses are coming, we're send you off toward Kladanj. Don't be afraid of anything, nobody is going to do anything to you. Thank you, thank you. Thanks, be safe. Nobody knows anything. Everything is done on my order."
Srebrenica Massacre

Quotes

“In our online descriptions and program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research, learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectible object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what constitutes the collectible object is the value which suffuses our choices. It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such "changing change".
I think it still seems so to me now but I do fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable.
It is interesting, I think, that recounting and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with (self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence "There is no simple way to say this."”

Michael Joyce (1945) American academic and writer

The same is true of any attempt to describe the way in which the collectible object participates in (I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian" above) the library as living archive. <br class="br"> An interview with Michael Joyce and review of Liam’s Going at Trace Online Writing Centre Archive (2 December 2002) http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=33

Life, World, Fear, Beauty

“1920
The Times
London, Saturday, May 8, 1920.
“The Jewish peril.”
A disturbing pamphlet
Call for inquiry.
(From a correspondent.)
The Times has not as yet noticed this singular little book. Its diffusion is, however, increasing, and its reading is likely to perturb the thinking public. Never before have a race and a creed been accused of a more sinister conspiracy. We in this country, who live in good fellowship with numerous representatives of Jewry, may well ask that some authoritative criticism should deal with it., and either destroy the ugly “Semitic” body or assign their proper place to the insidious allegations of this kind of literature.
In spite of the urgency of impartial and exhaustive criticism, the pamphlet has been allowed, so far, to pass almost unchallenged. The Jewish Press announced, it is true, that the anti-semitism of the “Jewish Peril” was going to be exposed. But save for an unsatisfactory article in the March 5 issue of the ‘’Jewish Guardian’’ and for an almost equally unsatisfactory article in the March 5 issue of contribution to the ‘’Nation’’ of March 27, this exposure is yet to come. The article of the ‘’Jewish Guardian’’ is unsatisfactory, because it deals mainly with the personality of the author of the book in which the pamphlet is embodied, with Russian reactionary propaganda, and the Russian secret police. It does not touch the substance of the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.” The purely Russian side of the book and its fervid “Orthodoxy.” Is not its most interesting feature. Its author-Professor S. Nilus-who was a minor official in the Department of Foreign Religions at Moscow, had, in all likelihood, opportunities of access to many archives and unpublished documents. On the other hand, the world-wide issue raised by the “Protocols” which he incorporated in his book and are now translated into English as “The Jewish Peril,” cannot fail not only to interest, but to preoccupy. What are the these of the “Protocols” with which, in the absence of public criticism, British readers have to grapple alone and unaided?”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Secret, Books, World, Religion

“Being encouraged by… success, beyond expectation; I afterwards ventured on many others and scarce missed of any, that I undertook, for many years, during our civil Wars, and afterwards. But of late years, the French Methods of Cipher are grown so intricate beyond what it was wont to be, that I have failed of many; tho' I have master'd divers of them. Of such deciphered Letters, there be copies of divers remaining in the Archives of the Bodleyan Library in Oxford; and many more in my own Custody, and with the Secretaries of State.”

John Wallis (1616–1703) English mathematician

Dr. Wallis's Account of some Passages of his own Life (1696)

War, Success

“Many decry the loss of “real time” to capturing moments on-screen, claiming that the recording of memories as they happen threatens to replace the actual memories you have of that moment. I’ve read many articles in which parents bemoan the fact their kids were seeing family vacations through GoPro cameras, rather than actually living them. After a day on the ski slopes, they edit their raw footage into action-packed greatest moments and post it to social media, where it’s shared and commented on by their friends, hyperextending their time on the mountain. For a generation raised on reality TV to be able to replay those moments over and over through a mediated interface is a way of reliving an eternal present, loved for a moment then replaced by the next day’s upload. In this way, we’re simultaneously archiving and forgetting: archiving because we continuously upload media, and forgetting because we rarely go back to visit what we have uploaded. Today’s upload is the best upload and keeps us very much present and mindful in the here and now.”

Kenneth Goldsmith (1961) American writer

Wasting Time on the Internet, 2016

Love, Family, Way, Mountain

“Everything we thought and felt in that past period ought to be deposited in an archive, and a new type of human being created.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

On Revolutionary Medicine (1960)

Past

“Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.”

O. Henry (1862–1910) American short story writer

"The Country of Elusion"
The Trimmed Lamp (1907)

Country

“To approach Bach, one has to realize that 100 years after Bach’s death, Bach and his music totally had been forgotten. Even while he was still alive, Bach himself believed in the polyphonic power and the resulting symmetric architectures of well-proportioned music. But this had been an artificial truth - even for him. Other composers, including his sons, already composed in another style, where they found other ideals and brought them to new solutions. The spirit of the time already had changed while Bach was still alive. A hundred years later, it was Mendelssohn who about 1850 discovered Bach anew with the performance of the St. Matthew Passion. Now a new renaissance began, and the world learned to know the greatness of Bach. To become acquainted with Bach, many transcriptions were done. But the endeavors in rediscovering Bach had been - stylistically - in a wrong direction. Among these were the orchestral transcriptions of Leopold Stokowski, and the organ interpretations of the multitalented Albert Schweitzer, who, one has to confess, had a decisive effect on the rediscovery of Bach. All performances had gone in the wrong direction: much too romantic, with a false knowledge of historic style, the wrong sound, the wrong rubato, and so on. The necessity of artists like Rosalyn Tureck and Glenn Gould - again 100 years later - has been understandable: The radicalism of Glenn Gould pointed out the real clarity and the internal explosions of the power-filled polyphony in the best way. This extreme style, called by many of his critics refrigerator interpretations, however really had been necessary to demonstrate the right strength to bring out the architecture in the right manner, which had been lost so much before. I’m convinced that the style Glenn Gould played has been the right answer. But there has been another giant: it was no less than Helmut Walcha who, also beginning in the 1950, started his legendary interpretations for the DG-Archive productions of the complete organ-work cycle on historic organs (Silbermann, Arp Schnitger). Also very classical in strength of speed and architectural proportions, he pointed out the polyphonic structures in an enlightened but moreover especially humanistic way, in a much more smooth and elegant way than Glenn Gould on the piano. Some years later it was Virgil Fox who acquainted the U. S. with tours of the complete Bach cycle, which certainly was effective in its own way, but much more modern than Walcha. The ranges of Bach interpretations had become wide, and there were the defenders of the historical style and those of the much more modern romantic style. Also the performances of the orchestral and cantata Bach had become extreme: on one side, for example, Karl Richter, who used a big and rich-toned orchestra; on the other side Helmut Rilling, whose Bach was much more historically oriented.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Death, Truth, World, Music

“No one's keeping track — no one's making of an archive of these "unimportant" things, you know… but now we have an archive … and in a way, the second there's many, it becomes proof of something, something that's so unspecific — that it's — that it's lively — to me that's really alive — that kind of half nauseous, half beautiful feeling.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Pretty Cool People interview (2007)

Beauty, Way, Feeling

“One can avoid misinterpreting information or jumping to false conclusions by cross checking important pieces of information through other methods of data collection. For example, if a questionnaire indicates major problems around supervision in one department, it may be useful to interview some supervisors and nonsupervisory personnel in the specific department for more detailed information. It also may be valuable to spend some time in the department observing the interactions between supervisors and subordinates. The most effective data collection strategy, therefore, is one that uses multiple measures and multiple methods of data collection. It is by combining data from interviews, questionnaires, observations, and archival sources that the consultant is able to triangulate and thus discard the data that may be distorted or biased.”

David A. Nadler (1948–2015) American organizational theorist

David A Nadler, Feedback and Organizational Development Using Data-Based Methods. Reading, Mass Addison-Wesley, 1977, p. 140; Cited in: Arthur G. Bedeian (1980). Organizations: Theory and Analysis : Text and Cases. p. 43.

Problem, Time, Falseness

“Though acts of reception and of understanding are in some measure fictions of ordered intuition, myths of reason, this truth does not justify the denial of intentional conduct. It is as absurd to discard as mendacious, as anarchically opaque, the bearing of contextual probability and suggestion, as it is to invest in such probability any blind trust. The negations of post-structuralism and of certain varieties of deconstruction are precisely as dogmatic, as political as were the positivist equations of archival historicism. The "emptiness of meaning" postulate is no less a priori, no less a case of despotic reductionism than were, say, the axioms of economic and psycho-sociological causality in regard to the generation of meaning in literature and the arts in turn-of-the-century pragmatism and scientism.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 3 (pp. 174-175).

Truth, Art, Literature, Understanding

“Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future—and it fascinated me—but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 332

Books, Flowers, Time, Future

“The Jugglers store patterns, but they seldom show any sign of comprehending actual content. We’re dealing with a mindless biological archiving system, a museum without a curator.”

Alastair Reynolds book Diamond Dogs

Turquoise Days, Chapter 1 (p. 177)
Short fiction, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days (2003)

“I hope, that in our archives and historical filings of the future, we do not allow the techie traditions of hierarchy and false regularity to be superimposed to the teeming, fantastic disorderlyness of human life.”

Ted Nelson (1937) American information technologist, philosopher, and sociologist; coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia"

http://www.raphkoster.com/2011/10/13/gdco2011-its-all-games-now/

Life, Hope, Future, Falseness

“Some of the surveillance was ostensibly devoted to terrorism suspects. But great quantities of the programs manifestly had nothing to do with national security. The documents left no doubt that the NSA was equally involved in economic espionage, diplomatic spying, and suspicionless surveillance aimed at entire populations. Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Penguin Books 2015 edition, page 94.
No Place to Hide (2014)

People, Communication

“The balance had been upset and the reactions from the American press and intelligence services were enraged. In a secret American report recently found in the archives, we read that Mattei's power must be contained at all costs and his possibilities for influencing the government must be reduced. Mattei is not only a force in industry, oil, and politics by now, but he also has a hold on information, because in 1957, through ENI, he took control of II Giorno, a Milanese daily, which at that time was much more important than it is today. It provided very lively coverage, had the best and brightest writers, it was present in every country in the world, and most of all, it had a policy of true support for the countries which were trying to free themselves from the colonial yoke, a policy of open support toward Algeria, for example, which was at the time a French colony. France was losing this colony, but there was a war, a savage repression from the French to hold onto their colony. Mattei sent Italo Pietra to Algeria, who later became the editor-in-chief of Il Giorno. He was the first, unofficial representative of Mattei who negotiated not with the French, but with the Algerians, the National Liberation Front”

Nico Perrone (1935) Italian historian and writer

Source: The Strategic Stakes in Mattei's Flight, p. 25

War, Secret, World, Intelligence

“Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.”

Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 5 “The Power and the Archives” (p. 122)

Nature, Success

“Direct observation of the testimony of the earth … is a matter of the laboratory, of the field naturalist, of indefatigable digging among the ancient archives of the earth's history.”

Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935) American geologist, paleontologist, and eugenist

"Evolution and Religion", The New York Times (5 March 1922), p. 91; written in response to an article a few days earlier in which William Jennings Bryan challenged the theory of evolution as lacking proof.
Context: Direct observation of the testimony of the earth... is a matter of the laboratory, of the field naturalist, of indefatigable digging among the ancient archives of the earth's history. If Mr. Bryan, with an open heart and mind, would drop all his books and all the disputations among the doctors and study first hand the simple archives of Nature, all his doubts would disappear; he would not lose his religion; he would become an evolutionist.

History

“Vampires can’t exist. There’d be detailed records in the archives; they couldn’t possibly evade detection by the state for any significant period. Besides which…there’d be corpses everywhere. Human blood is a poor nutrient source; it’s about 60 percent plasma by volume and only provides about 900 calories per liter, so your hypothetical blood-sucking fiend is going to have to drink about two and a half liters per day. Those calories don’t come in the form of useful stuff like glucose and fat: it’s mostly protein from circulating red blood cells. Dracula would have to exsanguinate a victim every day just to stay alive, and would suffer from chronic ketoacidosis. The total number of intentional homicides for the whole country is around 700 a year; a single vampire would cause a 50 percent spike in the murder rate. Or they’d have to take transfusion-sized donations about two thousand times a year.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 1, “Prologue: One Month Ago” (p. 2; ellipsis represents elision of one sentence of description)

Drink, Time, Suffering, Country

“Interpretation of previously untranslated documents in the Indian national archives offers a wealth of new perspectives on the Uprising and its aftermath. Inevitably, such an account of the conflict between Evangelical Christianity and Muslims brings to mind contemporary conflicts, and helps us to understand them.”

William Dalrymple (1965) author and historian

Jules Smith, in "William Dalrymple: Critical Perspective".
About William Dalrymple

Wealth, Help, Understanding

“Shri Dharampal has documented from old British archives, particularly those in Madras, that the indigenous system of education compared more than favourably with the system obtaining in England at about the same time. The Indian system was admittedly in a state of decay when it was surveyed by the British Collectors in Bengal, Bombay and Madras. Yet, as the data brought up by them proved conclusively, the Indian system was better than the English in terms of (1) the number of schools and colleges proportionately to the population, (2) the number of students attending these institutions, (3) the duration of time spent in school by the students, (4) the quality of teachers, (5) the diligence as well as intelligence of the students, (6) the financial support needed to see the students through school and college, (7) the high percentage of lower class (Sudra and other castes) students attending these schools as compared to the upper class (Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaisya) students, and (8) in terms of subjects taught.”

Dharampal (1922–2006) Indian historian

Goel, S. R. (2015). Hindu society under siege. (Ch. 3. The Residue of Christianism)

School, Time, Support, Intelligence

“All my friends with PalmPilots and cell phones, they’re always calling themselves and leaving reminders to themselves about what’s about to happen. We leave Post-it notes for ourselves. We go to that shop in the mall, the one where they engrave whatever shit you want on a silver-plated box or a fountain pen, and we get a reminder for every special event that life goes by too fast for us to remember. We buy those picture frames where you record a message on a sound chip. We videotape everything! Oh, and now there’s those digital cameras, so we can all email around our photos — this century’s equivalent of the boring vacation slide show. We organize and reorganize. We record and archive.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories (2004)

Life, Box, Photo

“It is very curious to see how in China and Morocco the vanquished pay for the costs of the expedition that crushed them.
[https://klara.be/leopold-ii-aflevering-3 Leopold II, Het hele Verhaal, Johan Op De Beeck Horizon, 2020] ISBN 9789463962094 Prince Leopold II in a travel note after reading in the Spanish Archive "Archivo General de Indias" in Sevilla in 1862.”

Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) King of the Belgians

Travel, Reading

“The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine.”

Anne Applebaum (1964) journalist

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017) quoted at "Ukraine in the Flames of the 1917 Revolution" (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, September 13, 2017) https://huri.harvard.edu/news/ukraine-flames-1917-revolution

Weather, Failure

“In art it is not enough to have talent. A true artist with the mind must never lack imagination and order his body to perform, remember and then archive.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Nell'arte non basta avere talento. Un vero artista con la mente non deve mai mancare di immaginazione ed ordinare al proprio corpo di eseguire, ricordare e poi archiviare.
Source: prevale.net

Imagination, Art