Neil MacGregor Quotes

23 quotes in 433 categories

• From the point where our ancestors started making tools, people have been unable to survive without the things they make; in this sense, it is…
• Objects are better than text at conveying narrative
• For a million years the sound of making handaxes provided the percussion of everyday life. Anyone choosing a hundred objects to tell a history of…
• In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are shrill. But ... the wisest voice of all of them may well…
• [The Persian Empire] left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together.
• The things we make have one supreme quality - they live longer than us. We perish, they survive; we have one life, they have many…
• The spread of Viking bling is a good indication of the spread of its culture.
• For the Greeks, there was no single canonical version of creation, but a number of overlapping stories.
• Google the name Prometheus, and see how often it has been given to innovations in many different fields, notably science, medicine and space exploration. The…
• It is a standing source of astonishment and amusement to visitors that the British Museum has so few British things in it: that it is…
• Thanks to the unprecedented reach of British navigation, London in the early 18th century was not just the emporium of the world, it was the…
• Hardest of all for Europeans to negotiate are traditional African religions, whose transactions with unseen powers are central to the running of life in many…
• For many, the icon of the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone, that administrative by-product of the Greek imperial adventure in Africa.
• A collection that embraces the whole world allows you to consider the whole world. That is what an institution such as the British Museum is…
• The deciphering of ancient scripts changed forever the way Europeans were able to imagine the story of humanity, destroying centuries of received authority about the…
• The British Museum was founded with a civic purpose: to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free…
• The collapse of the Tower of Babel is perhaps the central urban myth. It is certainly the most disquieting. In Babylon, the great city that…
• Our collective memories are welcoming places, and one image, that of Jesus, has absorbed and appropriated elements of other traditions and aspirations in order to…
• There is not much we can say with absolute confidence about the early church, but we can be fairly sure that the first Christians would…
• The Louvre stopped buying paintings in 1848, and neither the Metropolitan nor the Hermitage acquire contemporary material.

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