Stephen Gardiner Quotes

The Egyptians had no Stone age, and were born civilized.

Stonehenge is famously aligned with midsummer sunrise, and possibly also intentionally with midwinter sunset.

When Moses was alive, these pyramids were a thousand years old. Here began the history of architecture. Here people learned to measure time by a calendar, to plot the stars by astronomy and chart the earth by geometry. And here they developed that most awesome of all ideas - the idea of eternity.

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.

South Africa had a long record of studies in prehistory, going back to the end of the last century.

The trend of all knowledge at the present is to specialize, but archaeology has in it all the qualities that call for the wide view of the human race, of its growth from the savage to the civilized, which is seen in all stages of social and religious development.

Four hours after leaving Kornah, we passed the reputed tomb of Ezra the prophet. At a distance and in the moonlight it looked handsome. There is a buttressed river wall, and above it some long flat-roofed buildings, the centre one surmounted by a tiled dome.

Being in an area of the planet where scientists believe mankind started is quite amazing.

I'm a total nerd, so I'm on my telescope, or I read a lot. I'm very inspired by ancient history.

I collect rocks from all over the world. I have a ring of stones that date to 3500 B.C. It's like a little Stonehenge.

Who built the seven towers of Thebes? The books are filled with the names of kings. Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?. In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished

Before books, nothing got saved. We don’t know what the cavemen thought about caves even though they tried to write on the walls.

I love the past. I read about the past all the time.

The people of Egypt are an intelligent people with a glorious history who left their mark on civilization.

I love historical references.

Barbarism is not the inheritance of our pre-history. It is the companion that dogs our every step.

For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others.

I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history.

PREHISTORIC, adj. Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating the art and practice of perpetuating falsehood.

Ethiopians, that is, Negroes, gave the world the first idea of right and wrong and thus laid the basis of religion and all true culture and civilization.

The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.

Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories.

The first art in caves were really psychedelic experiences, and the reason that they were is because the tribal encyclopedia, the amount of information that people needed to know in order to move to a new way of life, suddenly increased over that period of time.

Old houses, I thought, do not belong to people ever, not really, people belong to them.