Just as there's garbage that pollutes the Potomac river, there is garbage polluting our culture. We need an Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up.
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.
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.
We are the only ones who really can care about the preservation Foreigners who come to excavate, maybe some of them care about preservation, but the majority care about discoveries.
What the word conservative means is not putting things back but conserving them. There are things that are threatened and you love them, so you want to keep them.
There may have been a time when preservation was about saving an old building here and there, but those days are gone. Preservation is in the business of saving communities and the values they embody.
I made efforts to swallow tears and to protect the species of the Japanese nation.
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.
Congress has a moral obligation as caretaker of America's culture.
I strongly believe that it's possible to conserve our heritage while making more healthful choices.
Our ancient historical monuments are national property and ought no longer to be left to the mercy of the many and variable ideas of ecclesiastical propriety that may at any time be prevalent among us
Our voices need to be raised in unison against the deterioration of our culture.
I have even begun to think that I am caring for Argentina and Chile perhaps more than Argentines and Chileans. I feel like I'm sort of a de facto citizen, because I am looking after their national patrimony - which is the land - very carefully.
You don't restore 'The Last Supper' by filling in the missing bits - you preserve. You accept the material that has somehow survived.
But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation.
The Italians have had 2,000 years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place!
Show me why your regulation of culture is needed. Show me how it does good. And until you can show me both, keep your lawyers away.
I'm looking at looting photos from space, and there are people putting their lives on the line every day protecting their heritage. I call these people the real culture heroes.
An important part of what the state does is preserving its history.
I really don’t make history; I preserve it.
It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.
Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact.
We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture.
This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.
So we have to be careful because if you don't protect your culture you won't have it for very long.
