Best 11 quotes of Neil Macgregor on MyQuotes

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.

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

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.

In 1600, when Shakespeares 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.

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.

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

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.

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

El hombre racional no puede dejar de luchar contra la irracionalidad bruta. Esta deshumanización del enemigo lleva a una senda peligrosa, pero constituye un magnífico grito de guerra cuando se libra un conflicto bélico. Si se pretende mantener a raya el caos. dice el mensaje, la razón tendrá que luchar una y otra vez contra la sinrazón.

Toda traducción tiene siempre algo de traición.

What does a great empire do when faced with imminent invasion and destruction? It can rearm at home and seek allies abroad; but more cunningly it can revisit its history to forge a myth that will unite the people and carry them through to victory, a myth that will demonstrate to everyone that their country has been specially chosen by history to uphold justice and righteousness.