Neil MacGregor Quotes

#1. The spread of Viking bling is a good indication of the spread of its culture.

Neil MacGregor

#2. the addition made in 1990: Albert Einstein, the first Jew in Walhalla.

Neil MacGregor

#3. Altogether one quarter of German territory was lost in 1945, territory which had for many centuries belonged to Germany.

Neil MacGregor

#4. The distinction between a gallery and a museum is enormous. The gallery is about looking at a thing of beauty; the purpose of the activity is an aesthetic response. The museum is actually about the object that lets you get into somebody else's life.

Neil MacGregor

#5. The focus in the Western pictorial tradition is on the body of Christ, the bit you can paint, the Nativity and the infancy, but above all the Passion, where you can find images for every stage and every moment.

Neil MacGregor

#6. 1945 nearly eight million Germans had been killed or were missing,

Neil MacGregor

#7. As the Persians wrote very little about how they ran their affairs, the Greek propaganda of the 5th century B.C. has for centuries gone virtually unchallenged - indeed, for Edward Said, it was the beginning of Europe's long habit of misunderstanding and ill-informed contempt of the Middle East.

Neil MacGregor

#8. Prometheus - trickster, rebel and hero - links the realm of the gods with the world of humanity, with which he had such close affinity. His act of stealing fire has been viewed as the foundation of all man's technologies.

Neil MacGregor

#9. 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 for.

Neil MacGregor

#10. There's the constant concern with what happens to you when you die. Every society thinks about that and makes things to deal with that.

Neil MacGregor

#11. In 1600, when Shakespeare's audience at the Globe heard 'Hamlet' for the first time, every one of them knew very well what it meant to be handed a cup of wine by a figure of authority and told to drink.

Neil MacGregor

#12. Among the accused was the author of Romeo and Juliet, one William Shakespeare.

Neil MacGregor

#13. Bavaria made the adoption of the Beer Purity Law a condition of its joining the new German Empire.

Neil MacGregor

#14. Objects let you tell a narrative that encompasses everybody. Texts don't.

Neil MacGregor

#15. 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 the world would have to include a handaxe.

Neil MacGregor

#16. In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are shrill. But ... the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder.

Neil MacGregor

#17. Brandenburg Beer War," fought out in the courts, lasted for ten years - all over a black beer brewed in the former GDR that contained sugar, something forbidden by the Purity Law.

Neil MacGregor

#18. I feel I understand now why, whenever there are revolutions, Shakespeare is what people turn to. Because whenever a society is on the cusp, about to become something else, they find themselves in Shakespeare.

Neil MacGregor

#19. 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 society and are still among the greatest threats to our liberty.

Neil MacGregor

#20. 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 past with repercussions as important for our understanding of time and history as the geological studies of the same period.

Neil MacGregor

#21. While there are few records of Viking women participating in battle, they certainly held positions of high status in society as human sorceresses known as 'volvas.'

Neil MacGregor

#22. Japan appears to be the birthplace of the soup and the home of the stew.

Neil MacGregor

#23. 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 shape our communal remembering.

Neil MacGregor

#24. So although the campaign for women's votes continued and the Bill was repeatedly brought back to Parliament, for nearly a generation most women held back from direct action and unladylike encroachment on the established power of men.

Neil MacGregor

#25. over 10 per cent of the population; two thirds of them from the armed forces.

Neil MacGregor

#26. [The Persian Empire] left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together.

Neil MacGregor

#27. The Louvre stopped buying paintings in 1848, and neither the Metropolitan nor the Hermitage acquire contemporary material.

Neil MacGregor

#28. Objects are better than text at conveying narrative

Neil MacGregor

#29. 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 first place in which it was possible to assemble artifacts from around the world and allow people to study them.

Neil MacGregor

#30. Astonishingly, at least to a non-German, the issue arose again at the reunification of 1990.

Neil MacGregor

#31. in 1596 a man called William Wayte claimed to have been set upon by four assailants outside the Swan Theatre

Neil MacGregor

#32. It is, as we know, the victors who write the history, especially when only the victors know how to write.

Neil MacGregor

#33. For many, the icon of the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone, that administrative by-product of the Greek imperial adventure in Africa.

Neil MacGregor

#34. Creation stories, so central in the religions of the Middle East, play a surprisingly marginal part in Greek myth. The Greeks had nothing to set alongside the resounding 'In the beginning' in the book of Genesis, where one eternal God creates the universe out of nothing.

Neil MacGregor

#35. Because of the long, long history of British shipping, immigration, trade, empire, missionaries, you can have a better shot at telling a worldwide story in the British Museum's collection than any other. Britain has been more connected with the rest of the world than any other country, for longer.

Neil MacGregor

#36. 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 making things that makes us human.

Neil MacGregor

#37. London theatre is different: it is a commercial theatre that brings the whole of society into one place. And Shakespeare grasped, better than anyone else, what it means to engage the entire audience.

Neil MacGregor

#38. 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 fire he stole can be seen, too, as the spark generating all artistic creativity.

Neil MacGregor

#39. 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 not have dreamed of making a likeness of Jesus.

Neil MacGregor

#40. The things we make have one supreme quality - they live longer than us. We perish, they survive; we have one life, they have many lives, and in each life they can mean different things. Which means that, while we all have one biography, they have many.

Neil MacGregor

#41. 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 areas, the main weapon in the struggle against the forces of evil.

Neil MacGregor

#42. Saddam Hussein was fascinated by ancient Babylon and Assyria. He made money available to protect and develop the great archaeological sites. The great achievements of Mesopotamian civilisation were pressed into the service of the Ba'athist regime.

Neil MacGregor

#43. 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 a museum about the world as seen from Britain rather than a history focused on these islands.

Neil MacGregor

#44. For the Greeks, there was no single canonical version of creation, but a number of overlapping stories.

Neil MacGregor