Neil MacGregor Quotes

Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.

Man is a tool-making animal

Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?

People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.

Most of us do more than subsist. From the vantage point of our ancestors, we live lives of almost unimaginable ease. Here again, we have innovation to thank.

Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.

… the biography of mankind

We've almost been wiped out as a species many times, going back millions of years, and we've survived by reinventing ourselves and enlarging our circles of awareness, inventing new technologies and social structures.

This whole thing called the internet and all this other kind of stuff is about to go crazy. It's all going to change. But, you know what's not going to change? The talented people.

Know why people run marathons? …Because running is rooted in our collective imagination, and our imagination is rooted in running. Language, art, science; space shuttles, Starry Night, intravascular surgery; they all had their roots in our ability to run. Running was the superpower that made us human — which means its a superpower all humans posses.

Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

I believe more than ever, machines will put new challenges, and that means we'll have to be more creative and more human, because that's the way to make the difference.

If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.

We make tools for people. Tools to create, tools to communicate. The age we're living in, these tools surprise you. ... That's why I love what we do. Because we make these tools, and we're constantly surprised with what people do with them.

Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.

People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a Somnambulist will go walking in his sleep. The interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.

I'm more pro-technology than people probably realize.

I actually believe that a lot of what people call originality has to do with persistence in the craft.

If we blow ourselves up we will do it by misapplication of science; if we manage to keep from blowing ourselves up, it will be through intelligent application of science.

There are two things that have been happening over the last few decades in my opinion. First, there have been unbelievable, remarkable, pioneering advances in technology and, second, an equal amount of evolution in creativity. These two shifts are meeting at an intersection.

We ask [ of the computer ] not just about where we stand in nature, but about where we stand in the world of artefact. We search for a link between who we are and what we have made, between who we are and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our intimacy with our own creations, we might become.

The most human thing about us is our technology.

So much technology, so little talent.

We're at a moment where people are rediscovering their ability to design, to create (engineer)and in essence, to become a true maker.

The skill-providers want to have more impact and solve problems; the problem people want new tools to get their problems solved.