Joseph Needham Quotes

The ancient world is always accessible, no matter what culture you come from. I remember when I was growing up in India and I read the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey.'

I loved history, particularly of the British, American and Old Testament kind.

Personally, my interests are ancient history and ancient civilizations. In my own life, I'd like to go to places like Easter Island.

The people and the cultures of what is known as Africa are older than the word 'Africa.' According to most records, old and new, Africans are the oldest people on the face of the earth. The people now called Africans not only influenced the Greeks and the Romans, they influenced the early world before there was a place called Europe.

I mean the truth is, I've always been interested in the whole setup of the Old World.

I have a long view of history - my orientation is archaeological because I'm always thinking in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Persia and Egypt.

I keep being surprised by the amount of archaeological sites and features that are left to find all over the world.

Saddam Hussein was fascinated by ancient Babylon and Assyria. He made money available to protect and develop the great archaeological sites. The great achievements of Mesopotamian civilisation were pressed into the service of the Ba'athist regime.

Any period is fascinating: the more ancient, the better.

I loved the myths of ancient Greece and Egypt.

Before the Greeks were the Tamils. The Tamils are one of the oldest civilizations that's still surviving.

One of the things that I love to do is travel around the world and look at archaeological sites. Because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilizations, and see where they succeeded and where they failed. Use science to, you know, work backwards and say, 'Well, really, what were they thinking?'

Archaeologists are underpaid publicity agents for deceased royalty.

Europe is merely powerful; India is beautiful.

Archaeology holds all the keys to understanding who we are and where we come from.

I want to travel the world - like Egypt. I love history. That's my favorite subject at school. From the building of the pyramids to... King Tut. Their way of working without technology. I find all that fascinating.

The tasks of paleontologists and classical historians and archaeologists are remarkably similar - to excavate, decipher and bring to life the tantalizing remnants of a time we will never see.

India and Vietnam are old civilizations. We have ancient cultural and spiritual connections.

Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with lichens,and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome or Greece, Etruria or Carthage, or Egypt or Babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare?

Greece appears to be the fountain of knowledge; Rome of elegance

I learned that along with the towering achievements of the cultures of ancient Greece and China there stood the culture of Africa, unseen and denied by the imperialist looters of Africa's material wealth.

I'm a big history buff so to walk the streets...the ancient world like that was pretty astounding.

The Berbers belong to a powerful, formidable, and numerous people; a true people like so many others, the world has seen - like the Arabs, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans.

Ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense.

All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,--is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There and Then, and introduce in its place the Here and Now.