A Quote by Samuel Johnson

All history was at first oral.

Samuel Johnson

Quote Topics

First History Oral

Quote Author

Samuel Johnson
English - Writer
September 18, 1709 - December 13, 1784

My book, Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research is about how researchers use this method and how to write up their oral history projects so that audiences can read them. It's important that researchers have many different tools available to study people's lives and the cultures we live in. I think oral history is a most needed and uniquely important strategy.

Patricia Leavy

Moreover, it is so important that people have the opportunity to share their stories and have them documented. There have been large-scale oral history projects after many events, from September 11th to Hurricane Katrina. Many oral history projects are much more confined, but equally valuable. We can learn about different working conditions, living conditions, trauma experiences and much more through oral history.

Patricia Leavy

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

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

James Fenton

Oral history is a research method. It is a way of conducting long, highly detailed interviews with people about their life experiences, often in multiple interview sessions. Oral history allows the person being interviewed to use their own language to talk about events in their life and the method is used by researchers in different fields like history, anthropology and sociology.

Patricia Leavy

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

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

I am not against songs in films. We come from an oral tradition of storytelling. I have grown up listening to epics in oral rendition and oral rendition always had music.

Mani Ratnam

I read Pamela Colloff's oral history about the campus shooting, '96 Minutes,' when it was first published, and my wheels immediately starting turning toward making a film and making it an animated re-telling.

Keith Maitland

I remember when I first saw Whoopi Goldberg doing standup, and she was wearing a sheet on her head, basically pretending to be this little white girl with long luxurious blonde hair. Everyone can relate to that. It's an oral history of black women's lives through laughter.

Mickalene Thomas

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

Neal Stephenson

I made some friends at Listerine and they taught me a little bit about oral care. That half of adults suffer from oral disease, that the number one chronic disease among children is oral disease, that we're only taking care of 25% of our mouths when brushing alone and there are more germs in your mouth than there are people on the planet.