Robert M. Edsel Quotes

#1. There's one good thing about being in the bomb disposal unit: No superior officer is ever looking over your shoulder.

Robert M. Edsel

#2. Had sold his soul, and that is something you can never repurchase at any price.

Robert M. Edsel

#3. How could one of the most important and unbelievable moments in art history - not to mention the history of a world war - simply become a forgotten footnote? But that's exactly what happened.

Robert M. Edsel

#4. Winston Churchill had grasped Eisenhower's hand and told him, with tears in his eyes, I am with you to the end, and if it fails we will go down together.

Robert M. Edsel

#5. That they will be sources of inspiration illuminating the past and vivifying the present; that they will fortify the spirit on which victory depends. Despite

Robert M. Edsel

#6. George Stout saw through their acts. "I am sick of all schemers," he wrote, "of all the vain crawling toads who now edge into positions of advantage and look for selfish gain or selfish glory from all this suffering."13

Robert M. Edsel

#7. Fellows are just naturally interested in a good piece of work and have no unnatural restrictions in looking it over. Perhaps, and may the sahibs of the Fogg forgive me for thinking it, this simple, curious outlook of healthy men is more important than some of the monuments themselves.

Robert M. Edsel

#8. They are expressions of faith, and they stand for man's struggle to relate himself to his past and to his God. With

Robert M. Edsel

#9. The skilled observer, not the machine, was the essence of conservation.

Robert M. Edsel

#10. It is also a near-perfect summary of what happens in the void of war and how history is more often than not a messy combination of intention, courage, preparation, and chance. If

Robert M. Edsel

#11. Stout was a leader - quiet, unselfish, modest, yet very strong, very thoughtful and remarkably innovative. Whether speaking or writing, he was economical with words, precise, vivid. One believed what he said; one wanted to do what he proposed. Neither

Robert M. Edsel

#12. Here, Mortimer Wheeler thought, is power. And a reminder of our mortality.

Robert M. Edsel

#13. Elderly people are like heat-seeking missiles for people who really have an interest in listening.

Robert M. Edsel

#14. General Patton, upon seeing the Roman ruins at Agrigento, remarked to a local expert, "Seventh Army didn't cause that destruction, did it, sir?" The man replied, "No sir, that happened in the last war." "What war was that?" "The Second Punic War."5

Robert M. Edsel

#15. Nations. These monuments are not merely pretty things, not merely valued signs of man's creative power. They are expressions of faith, and they stand for man's struggle to relate himself to his past and to his God.

Robert M. Edsel

#16. War did not come like a hurricane, Rorimer realized, destroying everything in its path. It came like a tornado, touching down in patches, taking with it one life while leaving the next person unharmed.

Robert M. Edsel

#17. It matters little that you are afraid if you manage to hide it. You are then at the edge of courage. (one of Jaujard's philosophies)

Robert M. Edsel

#18. That was the secret, he believed, to success in any endeavor: to be a careful, knowledgeable, and efficient observer of the world, and to act in accordance with what you saw.

Robert M. Edsel

#19. Writing now makes me feel as if I had lost at least one of my senses. I can't hear you or see you and I wonder if you hear me. One thing is quite sure. I love you. Yours, George.

Robert M. Edsel

#20. It was typical George Stout: detailed, timely, and understated. Here was a man that was never hurried. Who was careful. Punctual. Precise. An expert and a precisionist makes his analysis first, he always said, then his decision.

Robert M. Edsel

#21. We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future. Art

Robert M. Edsel

#22. I think we got some work done, back at the start, because nobody knew us, nobody bothered us - and we had no money.

Robert M. Edsel

#23. believed it was better to assume the burden of leadership than to drift along in the shadows.

Robert M. Edsel

#24. Possessed by the grasp of quality and connoisseurship, he knew and measured the worth of man's visible heritage and determined, in the midst of constant change, to preserve and enhance that heritage so that it might be visible to anyone with eyes to see."30

Robert M. Edsel

#25. He had no idea that the world was entering an economic depression, or that hard times bring recriminations and blame. Privately, Harry's parents worried not just about the economy, but about the rising tide of nationalism and anti- Semitism.

Robert M. Edsel

#26. There are fights that you may lose without losing your honor; what makes you lose your honor is not to fight.
-Jaques Jaujard

Robert M. Edsel

#27. It is amazing how the world can change, he thought, during the life span of a fruitcake.

Robert M. Edsel

#28. Destiny is not one push, she thought as she waited to cross a quiet street on that cold Paris evening years later, but a thousand small moments that through insight and hard work you line up in the right direction, like the magnet does the metal shavings.

Robert M. Edsel

#29. If the Nazis discovered they could push you, they would push you to your death. You had to be too much trouble to make it easy, but not so much they grew tired of you.

Robert M. Edsel

#30. Nobody wants to disappoint the boss and get fired. But if the boss hasn't said this is important, it's going to die a slow death in bureaucracy and that explains a lot of the problems.

Robert M. Edsel

#31. Colonel George A. Taylor rallied survivors with a cry, 'Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here.

Robert M. Edsel

#32. We can use laws to prosecute and make people think twice before going to do something like blowing up Buddhas and other things.

Robert M. Edsel

#33. Of all the charges which have been leveled against me," he is quoted as saying in the Nuremberg Interviews, "the so-called looting of art treasures by me has caused me the most anguish.

Robert M. Edsel