Quotes About The British Museum

#1. I guess it started in London, the night our dad blew up the British museum.

Rick Riordan

#2. In that flash of ecstasy she suddenly knew what all poetry, all music, all sculpture, except things like winged Assyrian Bulls, or the very broken pieces in the British museum, meant.

Angela Thirkell

#3. 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

#4. I'd been to the British museum before. In fact I've been in more museums than I like to admit - it makes me sound like a total geek.
[That's Sadie in the background, yelling I am a total geek. Thanks, Sis.]

Rick Riordan

#5. Read properly, fewer books than a hundred would suffice for a liberal education. Read superficially, the British Museum Library might still leave the student a barbarian.

Alfred Richard Orage

#6. Evolution writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum.

Fred Reed

#7. 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

#8. The biggest looters are the British Museum.

Lowkey

#9. The British Museum was our first real museum, the property of the public rather than the monarch or the church.

Kate Williams

#10. I used to wonder: Do only ignorant laypeople gaze on the colossal bust of Ramses II at the British Museum and ask themselves how it ended up there? Is it only the unschooled visitor who looks at the soaring column from the Temple of Artemis at the Met and questions why it exists in this place?

Sharon Waxman

#11. 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

#12. We have a hieroglyphical inscription in the British Museum as early as the reign of Sevechus of the eighth century before the Christian era, showing that the doctrine of Trinity in Unity already formed part of their religion and that ... the three gods only made one person.

Samuel Sharpe

#13. The fact that Holmes had earlier lodgings in Montague Street (alongside the British Museum) is forgotten. That was before Watson and we must have Watson too.

Christopher Morley

#14. [On the British Museum:] It was manifestly impossible to read all the books in that huge, gloomy structure, but I made a good try and accumulated a fund of useless information guaranteed to cast a pall over any dinner table.

Elsa Maxwell

#15. If there was a little room somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke, I believe I should become a museum man.

J.B. Priestley

#16. I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.

Kenneth Clark

#17. 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

#18. We went to the British Museum, and I was looking up my family in the books - pages and pages on it.

Nicholas Lea

#19. I've heard the sound of 70 condoms being scraped over the floor at the British Museum. It feels like being an adventurer. Why would you stay in your living room if you could go out and experience things no one's ever experienced?

Herbert

#20. When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.

C.S. Forester

#21. I mean seeing the Elgin marbles this morning gave me the same feeling and I didn't know, don't know whether I'm in Rome or Paris. I mean the Louvre and the British Museum hold one together, keep one from going to bits.

H.D.

#22. Yesterday I visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart. The present is burdened too much with the past.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#23. The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century - it was actually mummified, skin and all - but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire.

Adam Savage

#24. said, "because he was at the British Museum.

Dodie Smith

#25. If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#26. To look at and properly appreciate the British Museum is the work of a lifetime.

M. E. W. Sherwood

#27. When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.

Anthony Trollope

#28. 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

#29. The 'Robben Island Bible' has arrived at the British Museum. It's a garish thing, its cover plastered with pink and gold Hindu images, designed to hide its contents. Within is the finest collection of words generated by human intelligence: the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Daniel Hannan

#30. and Derry (give me a minute, give me a minute), but there's not much to compare with the British Museum,

Anonymous

#31. Somehow, this was one oddity too many. He could accept "Mind the Gap" and the Earl's Court, and even the strange library. But damn it, like all Londoners, he knew his Tube map, and this was going too far. "There isn't a British Museum Station," said Richard, firmly.

Neil Gaiman