Historical Preservation Quotes

Out of monuments, names, words proverbs ...and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.

The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.

In war, the first thing that goes, when you try to take over culture, is the statues. I think we all can recall statues with their heads cut off in museums.

The ancient city Aqpu, where kings who had preceded me had built, had deteriorated and turned into ruined hills. I rebuilt the city completely, decorated it and made it bigger than it was before. I then built my palace.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

I had mentors, growing up in gay life - older gay men who told me about our history and the history of art and culture - but somehow, the younger generation missed out on that synergy.

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

Some say that no one ever leaves Montreal, for that city, like Canada itself, is designed to preserve the past, a past that happened somewhere else.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history, but it's not very deep.

Architecture is the very mirror of life.You only have to cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society.

When I wrote 'The Alexandria Link,' I discovered that we are only aware of about 10 percent of the knowledge of the ancient world. In the ancient world, most of the knowledge was destroyed. Every emperor of China who came in wiped out everything that came before them, to the point that the country completely forgot its past.

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.

Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

Ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to avoid change; they couldn't entirely do so, of course, but did preserve a cultural continuity for almost four thousand years.

When you revise history, you lose it.

Music was the medium through which knowledge was passed from generation to generation.

Heritage will remain, first and foremost, a research institute dedicated to impeccable research and data-driven policy analysis.

Although I've lived in England for more than twenty years, I still have a foreigner's passion for all the details of English history and rural life.

A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.

Once you touch the trappings of monarchy, like opening an Egyptian tomb, the inside is liable to crumble

I was on a tour of a Restoration comedy in 1996, and in Moscow we stayed at the Metropole hotel, off Red Square. The food there was opulent, but in the Maly theatre canteen, there were just a few pieces of rye bread, peanuts, and gherkins. I stood in the queue and burst into tears.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them.