Alexander Pope Quotes

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

I'm in a museum. I'm a relic.

Just as a fossil is 'petrified time,' so is an ancient artifact or text.

I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history.

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?

What would I put in a museum? Probably a museum! That's an amusing relic of our past.

When we find something new at Giza, we announce it to the world. The Sphinx and the Pyramids are world treasures. We are the guardian's of these treasures, but they belong to the world.

The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations.

I love museums but I don't want to live in one.

An important part of what the state does is preserving its history.

It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history.

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.

Not only the Archivist alone but all who work for NARA are designated custodians of America's national memory.

I really don’t make history; I preserve it.

It may not be art, but it is history.

If there was a day that history was not recorded, then the history of one hundred days would be in peril.

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

Anybody great, we're all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it.

Ancient monuments 300 to 1000-plus years old are never 'renovated,' only 'restored,' a distinction that escapes the babus.

Washington and Lincoln mean as much to us as any two men could mean to a civilization, a people, and age, but I told Mr. Coolidge when he dedicated this monument that this rock is being carved with a monument that will outlive our government.

Statues lined the stairs and stood, dotted across the roof. But they had been brutalized by time and the weather. Some were missing arms. Many had no faces. Once they had been saints and angels. Two hundred years standing in London had turned them into cripples.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them.

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.

The Ancient Egyptians were not fools, Carter. They built the pyramids. They created the first great nation state. Their civilization lasted thousands of years.” “Yeah,” I said. “And now they’re gone.

I do photograph things for people to look at 100 years from now. But we're such a mediated society that things become historical the next day.