Neil Kinnock Quotes

People who look at Greek statues never say it's a shame because they're not complete.

The Elgin Marbles were supposed to be on the Parthenon. For many works of art, a museum is an artificial setting - a zoo, not a natural habitat.

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

You don't restore 'The Last Supper' by filling in the missing bits - you preserve. You accept the material that has somehow survived.

They are all very beautiful, but for the time it is not appropriate to leave them visible. Clean them and cover them over again carefully, so that they may survive until they are revealed to view in the future.

Think about what happens when architecture becomes ruins. All you have left are some little columns on a cliff, but it's still such an overwhelming experience that you could say architecture is that which makes ruins beautiful.

Someone asked me the other day what it feels like to see all my 'old stuff' reappearing, at long last, in digital. And I had to smile because to me it doesn't feel like 'old stuff.'

The Smithsonian museums are among this country's most endearing treasures and I look forward to helping maintain and enhance their coveted works of art.

Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of his teeth.

Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time.

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

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

I am intrigued by inanimate objects. They're a piece of history, someone's statement and ideas of life.

You don't let a historic site rot.

The beauty of the past belongs to the past.

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.

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

We say arts education is good for general education, but that's not the point. The arts are what great nations are remembered for. They are a mirror.

The charm of Brittany is to be found in the people and in the churches. The former, with their peculiar costumes and their customs, are full of interest, and the latter are of remarkable beauty and quaintness.

Everything on our land is holy to us and we will defend it and never be deceived, nor will we argue about biblical lies that penetrated the minds of some orientalists. We say: This land belongs to us. Jerusalem has been the capital of our capitals since the dawn of history, and will remain so. We won't share it with anyone. This land has known many tribes and invaders, from Mongolia in the East to the West. They all disappeared. The land is not theirs

I really don’t make history; I preserve it.

The statues are no big issue. They are only objects made of mud or stone.

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.

Like Love, Art ties together all the great sacred traditions because they all used creative expression, or we wouldn't know about them.