Quotes About Preservation

Every advance in information technology involves choosing what you want to preserve and what you want to ditch. Scanning rare books on to microfilm is a costly business. The library won't let you do it yourself - they decide first which books should be scanned and which should just rot away in the basement. Against that eventuality, people should start hoarding the kind of books committees of rational people will decide against scanning into a database.

As a rule, two extremely different alternative traits will not both be preserved by natural selection. One or the other is usually at least slightly more conducive to genetic proliferation. However marginal its edge, it should win out, given enough time.

Some of our mental machinery is exquisitely geared to that function, including the essence-preservation machinery that makes our enemies more readily blameworthy for bad behavior than our allies and makes it easy to witness the suffering of our enemies with indifference.

All those languages, all that whispering, simply a vicarious way of preserving our identity for an uncertain length of time.

Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.

Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it.

The last scroll was rolled so tight it seemed almost solid. Likely it was the oldest. As I forced it open it broke in pieces: two, three, and eventually five. I regretted doing it, but it was the only way to read it. If it had stayed coiled much longer, it would have crumbled into bits, never to be read again.

Winter had harvested us and stored us here in the Great Hall.

Those who idealize the past tend not to understand it: restoration kills it with kindness.

Like Margarita Chant Papandreou, president of the Women's Union of Greece, she can say, " I do want to argue that women's values, whether they are biologically imbedded or culturally instilled, are clearly more anti-war, more anti-violence, more for the preservation of life than are male values.

When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world.

A great-grandmother from the circle pushes her walker up close to the microphone. "It's not just the words that will be lost," she says. "The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It's too beautiful for English to explain." Puhpowee.

When we can no longer see the stars because of light pollution, the words of Thanksgiving should awaken us to our loss and spur us to restorative action.

Leave this place better than you found it," she admonished. And so we did. We also had to leave wood for the next person's fire, with tinder and kindling

The government labels the haenyeo a cultural heritage treasure—something dying out that must be preserved, if only in memory. How does it feel to be the last of the last?" If they're academics, they'll want to talk about Jeju's matrifocal culture, explaining, "It's not a matriarchy. Rather, it's a society focused on women.

I would be a pillow at the small of her back, a glass of cold water on a tray, a cloth shielding her from the sun. I would be a dictionary holding all the languages known and unknown. I would save everything.

Why did people think that was okay, to kill something and stick its head on your wall?

If you put pussy willows in water, they'll blossom and then die. Just put them in the vase alone, and they'll stay beautiful forever.

Perfect preservation isn't life, it's death.

all the wild ways he had shown me, mosses and rushes and heather, the home of the curlew and snipe, and the grazing grounds of the geese, all those enchanted fields and the magical willows lying under the edge of the bog, all were to be spoiled, hidden, sold and disenchanted by that terrible force named Progress.

It had been my father's way to remove obstructions, to repair washouts in old trails, to leave each trail better than he had found it. Tread lightly on the paths, he had told me. Others will come when you have gone. That was how I would remember my father. There was never a place he walked that was not the better for his having passed. For every tree he cut down he planted two.

The desert preserves. What other lands destroy, the desert keeps. It accepts dead things, holds them close, and draws away the rot that would destroy; given time, it mummifies or crystalizes.

When pastor John Heyl Vincent dropped by to transmit his hope that Ulysses "might be preserved from all harm and restored to his family," Julia fairly burst out with a new fantasy: "Dear me! I hope he will get to be a major-general or something big!

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.