Neil MacGregor Quotes

There really is only one story that you need to tell as a scientist or a technologist. It's Prometheus stealing fire. That's it. That's what we do as scientists or technologists.

If we stop exploring space, we're going to lose the same part of us that found vaccines and penicillin, the part that searches for cures to cancer and AIDS.

If we hadn't put a man on the moon, there wouldn't be a Silicon Valley today.

The Swedish engineer who invented the zip fastener made a greater intellectual leap than many scientists do in a lifetime.

Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective.

There are many men now living who were in the habit of using the age-old expression: 'It is as impossible as flying.' The discoveries in physical science, the triumphs in invention, attest the value of the process of trial and error. In large measure, these advances have been due to experimentation.

Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon he promises the stars he'll make us a new universe if it comes to that.

At every stage of understanding the universe better, the benefits to civilisation have been immeasurable. None of those big leaps were made with us knowing what was going to happen.

Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

This is not yet a scientific age.

Imagination is the beginning of creation.

I call the age we are entering the creative age because the key factor propelling us forward is the rise of creativity as the primary mover of our economy.

There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.

Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.

Even the great scientists have reported that their creative break-throughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising result of a nationwide inquiry among America's most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking 'plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself'.

When Lord Kelvin was in this country [U.S.], he said that nothing interested him so much as Mr. Hewitt's work and his vacuum lamp.

I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever - much cleverer than the discoverers - never originate anything.

Go looking for an idea and it'll show up. Begin now.

Apollo wasn't just about sending people into space. It transformed so much of our economy. From our education system to so many of the things we use today, it was a vision that led to the total transformation of the planet.

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.

Creative people see Prometheus in a mirror, never Pandora.

Science is the future of mankind.

Folks wanna be like Will I Am not Bill I Am. They wanna be like Stevie Wonder not Steve Jobs.

Ideas come to people who are receptive to them.

I absolutely adore the alchemy of a bit of an idea.