Mike Mills Quotes

Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place in museums; others, we take for walks.

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

The immigrant experience in 'Ilustrado' was only a small part of what I intended to be a broader look at the Filipino experience, even if that broader look was itself merely a specific perspective.

Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.

I like traditions, and the national anthem is important.

I don't think you can separate a place from its history. I think a place is much more than the bricks and mortar that go into its construction. I think it's more than the accidental topography of the ground it stands on.

It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history.

I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

It is of the essence of traditions that they cover or conceal their humble foundations by erecting impressive edifices on them.

Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor laid the groundwork for us as Indian-Americans. How can we add our story to their groundwork is the question.

Looting has an immense impact on our ability to understand our global cultural heritage; once these objects are gone, so too is our chance of piecing together humanity's shared story.

I'm in a museum. I'm a relic.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.

Just as a fossil is 'petrified time,' so is an ancient artifact or text.

You can't argue that you have to have art, and prove it to anybody. Why should I give $1,000 to art when there are people starving? Of course, that's true. But just because you can't, theoretically, defend the arts, or make a sensible argument for their preservation, doesn't mean they're not important.

I find the history of toys very interesting on an academic level - they're very much products of their time, just like paintings and furniture tell us about their time.

I'm a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter, and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.

Few realise that English poetry is rather like the British constitution, surrounded by pompous precedents and reverences.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them.

If people are eating mostly pickles after many generations, where did that come from? It's reflective of history, often a painful history. It's central to a culture, to a history, to a personal story. It's communication at its most fundamental.

Archaeology is not only the hand maid of history, it is also the conservator of art.