Historical Relics Quotes

The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.

When I was a boy, I took over the shed at the bottom of the garden and displayed fossils and potsherds and coins in it and proudly called it my 'museum'. I charged people to come in, and my most prized possession was a Saracen shield dating from the Crusades.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them.

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

Some days, I would find what seemed like entire family trees, torn from once-treasured albums and dumped in disorganized bins, selling 10 for a dollar. I wondered how people could give up pictures of their great-grandparents for complete strangers to paw through - or why complete strangers would want them.

Our mind has its history, just as our body has its history. You might be just as astonished that man has an appendix, for instance. Does he know he ought to have an appendix? He is just born with it....Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past. A study of the structure of the unconscious collective mind would reveal the same discoveries as you make in comparative anatomy. We do not need to think that there is anything mystical about it.

We are opening up an enormous new era in archaeology. Time capsules in the deep oceans.

But that was the trouble with ancient artifacts - no one really knew what they did.

We could imagine nothing pleasanter than to spend all of our lives digging for relics of the past.

I never stopped thinking about the Alamo from that day to this. I'm a huge collector of memorabilia. I've got Davy Crockett's bullet pouch. I've got Colonel Travis's belt.

The descent of Israel from the morally towering position of a 'light for the nations' to the lowest of the low and one of the last relics of bygone shameful times of merciless imperialism, conquest, exploitation is on the cards.

Although Damascus is considered the oldest city in the world, the date of its foundation going beyond tradition, there are very few relics of antiquity in or near it.

There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relics of the giants of the past.

Buttons are the fossils of the sartorial world, enduring long past the garments they were designed to hold together.

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?

We passed hieroglyphic scrolls, gold jewelry, sarcophagi, statues of pharaohs, and huge chunks of limestone. Why would someone display a rock? Aren't there enough of those in the world?

Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.

I grew up around old stuff that was not necessarily valuable, but certainly unusual.

Not a single piece of material culture - not a single object - has been found at Giza that can be interpreted to come from a lost civilization.

A horseman's head is in Athens, and his body is in London: Poseidon's torso is separated between Greece and the U.K. This means that they cannot be celebrated and appreciated as a whole in the country they came from.

The weapons that were once outside sharpening themselves on war are now indoors there, in the fortress, fragile in glass cases; Why is it (I'm thinking of the careful moulding round the stonework archways) that in this time, such elaborate defences keep things that are no longer (much) worth defending?

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

Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.

Antiques exist as evidence of the cultural tracks we made in the past.