Simon Rattle Quotes

With population pressures, urbanization, and modernization encroaching, we're in a race against time. Why not use the most advanced tools we have to map, quantify, and protect our past?

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.

Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.

It's still possible to find pockets of old Dublin - but its becoming more and more rarified.

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.

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

New York has always been a city of change and a city about change, and it is a back-leading development. Nobody's going to want to come to New York if it looks like another strip mall.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

It may not be art, but it is history.

Jazz at Lincoln Center is something that is very necessary for the creative process. There's a couple of brothers running around New York, trying to buy up the cultural places, who shall remain nameless. Well, there's a lot of brothers - pick any two. Pin the tail on the... they want to buy up stuff and steer the country a certain way.

I know that the Seattle my parents knew is not the Seattle I know and that these things exist in a state of constant flux and change. The hope is that at least some of that change can be for the better.

My grandmother, Betty Bertha Bright, lived in the Armenian block in Kolkata. After '36 Chowringhee Lane,' we haven't seen that part of the city in films.

That's the beauty of Mumbai. While some parts have grown rapidly, there are places like Churchgate that have retained their character.

I believe history and tradition is something solid and something we can rest on. I am not crazy about putting new spices in chocolate.

The Arab who built himself a hut with marbles from the temple of Palmyra is more philosophical than all the curators of the museums of London, Paris, and Munich.

Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.

China has had a long and complex history and has managed to evolve its own culture for 4,000 years. It therefore not necessarily true that we know exactly what is best for the internal structure of China.

This patriotic revolution where people want to find their own identity are not racist but want to fight for the preservation of their own people. Their own country, their own values. Their own money. Their own borders. This is such a positive thing.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everything in the past is great and everything modern is terrible. But I do think cities should be a mix of old things and new things.

I think where you're born brings a history with it - a cultural history, a mythical history, an ancestral history, a religious context - and certainly influences your perception of the world and how you interpret everyday reality.

In Brazil, there is a fear and a denial of our past. Downtown Rio used to display the history of colonialism in Brazil. They had beautiful buildings and theaters, and there was a bakery that was threatened to be demolished, but people insisted against it. They laid down in front of it and said, "You're going to have to go over my body to destroy it." It frustrates me when I see people on Facebook posing in front of old buildings while on vacation, because they could've posed in front of equally beautiful buildings at home in Rio.

As far as Germany extends it ruins culture.

Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.

There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.

Europe has an incredibly long, bloody history based on an excess of nationalism which has also created a lot of amazing art. The issue is that America also imported a lot of that wholesale, dropped it onto this other big continent over the sea, and that's worked really well so far, but my view is that a little breather is necessary to make sure that - because Europe is about to fall, Sweden is going, Germany is going, France is going, America is going to be the preserver of that inheritance.