John Betjeman Quotes

We've got to map all of our ancient history before it's gone because, let's face it, if we don't have a common heritage to share, something to get excited about, then what are we living for?

With each passing decade, history becomes less real for us, less immediate and essential to our way of life, and so, like 'green' nature, more of a commodity or an advertising gimmick.

A country, a style or an epoch are interesting only for the idea behind them.

To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it. Monuments differ in different periods. Each age has its own.

A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.

Monuments are for the living, not the dead.

Buildings like Penn Station attract our protective instincts not only because of their beauty but because we fear what will come to replace them.

Historically, in the world of architecture, enormous amounts of care and energy have been lavished on things that are almost a cliched idea of culture.

It makes the city unique and hold a charm. In old Kolkata, there are some beautiful old buildings... some of them are well-maintained; somewhere reflects what the city has gone through in the past.

There are huge pluses in Scottish archaeology that you simply don't get elsewhere. Partly that's to do with the tragedy of the clearances, and that so much of the landscape has been owned by so few people that didn't want it messed around with.

It might be the wish of many people that Allahabad can be renamed as Prayagraj. I think that it will give a very good message.

What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself.

We are the only country in the world that trashes its old buildings. Too late we realize how very much we need them.

You see all these old buildings [in Rio] going down or catching fire overnight, and it is so sad. I am very connected with these buildings because they are our history. It is the only one that we have.

If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.

Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of the old. Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? Here the wisdom of whole generations is stored. What feelings for material and what power of expression there is in these buildings! What warmth and beauty they have! They seem to be echoes of old songs.

Basically, I have found that people who have tried to start communities out of good feelings or hippie-dippie abstract concepts of love - it doesn't work. But if you just concentrate on what is the identity of your town - its waterfalls, its battles, its notable mill strike or those things - you dig into what your town is from its rock formations to its history to its food. Then this thing called community happens all the time.

Museums collect what's important in their respective countries. In Berlin's National Gallery, however, this isn't the case. They're interested neither in me nor the other usual suspects. It's simply a German reality.

For decades engineers have stood accused that their buildings do not have any cultural value. We have attempted to liberate engineering of this accusation. As National Socialists we are dedicated to working with boldness, but also with love of the Volk and our landscape in mind. These roads do not serve transportation alone, they also bind our Fatherland. In these highways our engineering will reflect the National Socialist movement.

In Brazil, there is a fear and a denial of our past. Downtown Rio used to display the history of colonialism in Brazil. They had beautiful buildings and theaters, and there was a bakery that was threatened to be demolished, but people insisted against it. They laid down in front of it and said, "You're going to have to go over my body to destroy it." It frustrates me when I see people on Facebook posing in front of old buildings while on vacation, because they could've posed in front of equally beautiful buildings at home in Rio.

Earth's biggest country 's gut her soul, An' risen up earth's greatest nation.

I believe that the faith heritage of this country is actually a very important part of America's culture.

Hebrew is this unique thing that you cannot translate to any other language. It has to do with its history.

We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere.

Those of you who have been there [Haiti] know it is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. It has everything. It has everything above the ground, and everything under the ground.... It is an amazing place. I strongly recommend that whenever you get a chance, if you haven't been there, that you go to Haiti. I think it was a certain Queen of England who said that after her death "Calais" would be found written on her heart. When I die, I think that "Haiti" is going to be written on my heart.