Neil MacGregor Quotes

I'm so suspicious of our own understanding of the past. I just think that your mind plays absolute tricks on you and fools you every minute of every day. And so when you're talking about the past, you're talking about something that never happened. At least it didn't happen the way you think it happened.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

We romanticize the past with an illusion that we'd know how we'd fit.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past

There can be no dedication to Canada's future without a knowledge of its past.

At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.

Writing plays fast and loose with the past.

We knew in our gut that History needed to be more than a timeline.

Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style.

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

There is a recurring temptation for any nation, and for any writer who operates within its field of force, to make an ornament of the past: to turn the losses to victories and to restate humiliations as triumphs.

The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

Every film that is made about the past is always a reflection of the present.

'Nowness' is a dynamic relation between the past and the future.

We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.

Can we ever understand the past, or do we just endlessly rework it to suit us in the present?

It would strike me as ridiculous to want to doubt the existence of Napoleon; but if someone doubted the existence of the earth 150years ago, perhaps I should be more willing to listen, for now he is doubting our whole system of evidence.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

‎The past is always an invented land.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

For what is time? ... Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? ... If no one asks me, I know: If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.

I studied scriptural interpretation, which is more about how people get meaning out of texts, looking at stuff in the Old Testament - Muslims, Christians, Jews, different interpretations of the same texts.

History at its best is vicarious experience.

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.

No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives.