Sam Wanamaker Quotes

History is more interesting than most people think.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

It's very important to reveal the mystery of the pyramid. Science in archaeology is very important. People all over the world are waiting to solve this mystery.

A gold book, fastened together in the shape of a book by wires of the same metal, had been dug up in the northern part of the state of New York, and along with the book an enormous pair of gold spectacles!

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

Seeing sites and features in places where we never looked or never thought things might exist is causing archaeologists across the world to think deeper about their sites or entire cultures.

The most exciting part of what I do is understanding the scale of what we don't know. There are just countless archaeological sites all over the world, and one of the most important and best ways of finding them is using digital technology.

Most time capsules, when they're unearthed, are really awful. There's nothing good in them.

Just as a fossil is 'petrified time,' so is an ancient artifact or text.

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.

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.

It might be the wish of many people that Allahabad can be renamed as Prayagraj. I think that it will give a very good message.

Your subjects have had a history - try to reveal it in your picture.

It blew my mind that this stuff had survived for two thousand, three thousand years.

I was astonished at the effect my successful landing in France had on the nations of the world. To me, it was like a match lighting a bonfire.

The odd thing about tradition is, the longer it's been going, the more people seem to take it seriously - as though sheer passage of time makes something which to begin with was just made up, turns it into what people believe as a fact.

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.

I was talking to my grandpa last Thanksgiving. He pulled me aside and was like, "This Thanksgiving is the 150th for the Vaughn family in Chicago." I was like, "Cool, whatever," but I think when you have a culture like that, you should have a real appreciation for it. My family's been there forever and I don't want to leave.

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.

Moscow... how many strains are fusing in that one sound, for Russian hearts! What store of riches it imparts!

The Iraq War is the first war in history, in which there were huge demonstrations before the war was launched, not beginning five years later and then being broken up. All of these are changes, and the people who are writing in journals today lived through these changes.

I think I'm fascinated with history and - just in general. And I'm always interested in how did - how did this come to be? Why is this the way it is? And even singing classical voice, I quickly became more and more interested with early music, baroque voice. And that became an obsession to me - just figuring out how - who are the ancestors of whatever it is.

Since the early beginning of history, India has been the Klondyke of the world

Imagine going to the holy land in Israel, whether you're a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim, and start carving up the mountain of Zion. It's an insult to our entire being. It's bad enough getting four white faces carved in up there [on Mount Rushmore], the shrine of hypocrisy.