Laurence Goldstein, The American poet at the movies: a critical history, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994, 272 pp., 1915
Griffith proclaimed in 1915 that because of film "the human race will think more rapidly, more intelligently, than it ever did. It will see everything-positively everything."
"Here are sample comments by Griffith from an interview of 1915."
"Audiences have the good old American faculty of wanting to be "shown" things. We don't "talk" about things happening, or describe how a thing looks; we actually show it-vividly, completely, convincingly. It is the ever-present, realistic, actual now that "gets" the great American public, and nothing ever devised by the mind of man can show it like moving pictures.
"The time will come, and in less than ten years . . . where the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures. Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again."
"There is nothing surprising in Griffith's ambition to marginalize historiography and literature in favor of his own technics."
Cited in Harry M. Geduld, (ed.) Focus on D.W. Griffith (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 34.