To History Documentary Quotes & Sayings

I spent my childhood and youth on the outskirts of the Alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war I was just one year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me ... I see pictures merging before my mind's eye - paths through the fields, river meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with images of destruction - and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if I were coming home ... — W.G. Sebald

If everyone knows so much about it, why do they need to make a documentary? — Brigid Pasulka

The Lotus grows in the most inhabitable of environments, and yet its beauty and purity persevere. A reminder that not all have to conform . . . or settle for what is." - Theodore Teizel — Bridget Ladd

You made a point about proof. In this sort of history we do nt have proof ... Yet ... the incontrovertibility of the evidence can be plain even when it is not documentary or complete. — Robert Conquest

I've been reading and researching various aspects of history - Dickens' London, Nelson's sea battles, Magellan's nautical explorations, the weapons and battles and key figures of the American Civil War - for most of my life. I pick up a book here or there or see a documentary or talk with an expert in the subject, and my curiosity about the one area of study and discovery always leads to another. — Gary Paulsen

There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things. — Henry James

The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history. — Catherine Opie

I've always been interested in Vietnam, feel it's a seminal event in our nation's history, and have explored it over the years - but I hadn't been interested in doing a documentary about it. I felt there had been a lot done about Vietnam, and didn't know if I could add anything new to the discussion. — Rory Kennedy

Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time. — Stephen Richards

Content is not mere facts, drummed into tender little minds under the relentless pounding of rote learning. Content--even the date of the Quebec Act, Confederation, or the Battle of Vimy Ridge, or the name of the first prime minister-- is cultural capital, a basic requirement of life that every Canadian needs to comprehend the daily newspaper, to watch the TV news or a documentary, or to argue about politics and cast a reasonably informed vote. In an increasingly complex and immediate world, cultural capital must also include some knowledge of Europe, Africa, and Asia, too. — J.L. Granatstein

Director Ken Burns revealed that his next documentary is about Franklin Roosevelt, and it's fourteen hours long ... which sounds like too much, until you realize there's been over thirty hours of TV dedicated to Honey Boo Boo. — Jimmy Fallon

Dance, and make joyous the love around you. Dance, and your veils which hide the Light shall swirl in a heap at your feet. — Rumi

electrical wires dragged down by the weight of the ice and flickering balefully, a row of sleet-covered planes stranded in an airport, a huge truck that's jackknifed and tipped over and is lying on its side with smoke coming out. An ambulance is on the scene, a fire truck, a huddle of raingear-clad operatives: someone's been injured, always a sight to make the heart beat faster. A policeman appears, crystals of ice whitening his moustache; he pleads sternly with people to stay inside. It's no joke, he tells the viewers. Don't think you can brave the elements! His frowning, frosted eyebrows are noble, like those on the wartime bond-drive posters from the 1940s. Constance remembers those, or believes she does. But she may just be remembering history books or museum displays or documentary films: so hard, sometimes, to tag those memories accurately. Finally, a minor touch of pathos: a stray dog is displayed, semi-frozen, wrapped in a child's pink nap blanket. A gelid baby — Margaret Atwood

Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp. — W.G. Sebald

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history. — Joseph Conrad

The spirit of man is not a created being; it existed from eternity and will exist to eternity. Anything created cannot be eternal; and earth, water, ect., had their existence in an elementary state, from eternity." ~Joseph Smith, Jr., 2 July 1839 - Documentary History of the Church 3:387 — Joseph Smith Jr.

I'm so proud of myself. I thought, 'I've got to learn about American history.' I literally took two months off and watched every documentary known to man. I really didn't know Benjamin Franklin was so cool. — Rene Russo

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time. — Jeanette Winterson

The written word is greatest sacred documentation. — Lailah Gifty Akita

If these influences are reversed - and they can be - an environment designed around the true needs of individuals, conducive to the formation of community and preservation of the landscape, becomes possible. — Andres Duany

They were such seriously futile people that she found herself wanting to cry out against their ready-made justifications for pointless lives. — Frank Herbert

Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker. Capturing moments in time; never knowing how history will judge them. — Pamela Yates

I'm really excited to be a part of it and sharing the legacy, any documentary I look up at the sky and Kevin Burns did and Bryan did and showed me again you know the history that's in this character and you know. — Brandon Routh

The ancient priests had said, "Thus far and no farther. We set the limits to thought." The Greeks said, "All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set to thought." It is an extraordinary fact that by the time we have actual, documentary knowledge of the Greeks there is not a trace to be found of that domination over the mind by the priests which played such a decisive part in the ancient world. The priest plays no real part in either the history or the literature of Greece. — Edith Hamilton

We exaggerate the difference between documentary and fiction. I think that on some level a fiction film is also a documentary on the actors. You can't wash away your life's history, which is written on your face, unless you get a facelift. — Pirjo Honkasalo

It is clear from both documentary and archaeological sources that conspicuous display and consumption of wealth was fundamental for an elite male to maintain power and position in society. — Sally Crawford

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. — George Orwell