Zahi Hawass Quotes

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

We've got to map all of our ancient history before it's gone because, let's face it, if we don't have a common heritage to share, something to get excited about, then what are we living for?

An important part of what the state does is preserving its history.

These places, and the ancient things you know, You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'

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.

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?

The music is just so rich and part of the culture there. I suddenly felt like I needed to go on this mission to make sure we save New Orleans because - not that I can save anything - but it's so much part of what this country is, this whole mix of people coming together and doing this thing.

Museums are western inventions where the rich and the powerful or the government and the state tend to exhibit the signs and symbol and images of their culture.

One of the brilliant things about Britain is the way you've managed to save old things but to keep using them - that they've not just become museums the way they do in the United States.

The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations.

It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history.

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

It may not be art, but it is history.

My dream is to map every archaeological site in the world because, if we can do that, then we have this massive global data base that all sorts of global heritage organizations and heritage organizations within countries can use, and they can use that information to protect what's there.

Ancient monuments 300 to 1000-plus years old are never 'renovated,' only 'restored,' a distinction that escapes the babus.

There are huge pluses in Scottish archaeology that you simply don't get elsewhere. Partly that's to do with the tragedy of the clearances, and that so much of the landscape has been owned by so few people that didn't want it messed around with.

How to save the old that's worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them.

I am very concerned about our national heritage, and I am very concerned that the films that I watched when I was young and the films that I watched throughout my life are preserved, so that my children can see them.

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.

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.

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.