Burning the Books Quotes

“And then Bodley put his money where his mouth was and disinherited his own family.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“As more and more of the world’s memory is placed online we are effectively outsourcing that memory to the major technology companies that now control the internet.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified . . . every date altered . . . And the process is continuing day by day. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right,’ wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“In a famous letter of 1813, Thomas Jefferson compared the spread of knowledge to the way one candle is lit from another: ‘He who receives an idea from me’, wrote Jefferson, ‘receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.’24 Libraries and archives are institutions that fulfil the promise of Jefferson’s taper – an essential point of reference for ideas, facts and truth.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack

“privacy of his children (and of himself) at the forefront of his mind when he destroyed parts of Sylvia Plath’s journals.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“It has been estimated that over 100 million books were destroyed during the Holocaust, in the twelve years from the period of Nazi dominance in Germany in 1933 up to the end of the Second World War.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“cultural leaders including Fritz Haber, Max Liebermann and Max Planck.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“On Christmas Eve 1851 a fire took hold in a chimney of the library and more than half of the library’s 55,000 books were destroyed, including most of the Jeffersonian library.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“6,487 books for the sum of $123,950.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“The antiquaries’ obsession with the past preserved it for the future.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“In 1610 the Vatican Archives in their modern form also came into being.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“a practice that was to become standard in centuries to follow, but then a landmark in intellectual history.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“No other library in Europe was so dedicated to the preservation of its collection, to the aggressive expansion of its holdings, and at the same time to broadening access to the community beyond its immediate constituency.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“among the documents he preserved were at least two, possibly three, of the original thirteenth-century official copies of Magna Carta,”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“oral tradition of memorising the Quran”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“The rubbish heap at Oxyrhynchus, excavated in 1897 by the Egypt Exploration Society, provides us with over 70 per cent of surviving literary papyri.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“Johannes Lydus at Byzantium in the sixth century had more complete texts of Seneca and Suetonius than have passed down to us.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“(even though the details of exactly what the library was like is obscure).”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“insurgent rebellion of Palmyra,”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“Formally founded in 1598, and first opened to readers in 1602, the Bodleian in Oxford has enjoyed a continuous existence ever since.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“storage is not the same thing as preservation.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

“Papyrus, paper and parchment are highly combustible.”
― Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge