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Neil Macgregor Quotes


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Quotes by Neil Macgregor

Showing 11-20 of 30 Quotes by Neil Macgregor

Creation stories, so central in the religions of the Middle East, play a surprisingly marginal part in Greek myth. The Greeks had nothing to set alongside the resounding 'In the beginning' in the book of Genesis, where one eternal God creates the universe out of nothing.

~Neil Macgregor

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Prometheus - trickster, rebel and hero - links the realm of the gods with the world of humanity, with which he had such close affinity. His act of stealing fire has been viewed as the foundation of all man's technologies.

~Neil Macgregor

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Google the name Prometheus, and see how often it has been given to innovations in many different fields, notably science, medicine and space exploration. The fire he stole can be seen, too, as the spark generating all artistic creativity.

~Neil Macgregor

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As the Persians wrote very little about how they ran their affairs, the Greek propaganda of the 5th century B.C. has for centuries gone virtually unchallenged - indeed, for Edward Said, it was the beginning of Europe's long habit of misunderstanding and ill-informed contempt of the Middle East.

~Neil Macgregor

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Hardest of all for Europeans to negotiate are traditional African religions, whose transactions with unseen powers are central to the running of life in many areas, the main weapon in the struggle against the forces of evil.

~Neil Macgregor

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For many, the icon of the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone, that administrative by-product of the Greek imperial adventure in Africa.

~Neil Macgregor

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A collection that embraces the whole world allows you to consider the whole world. That is what an institution such as the British Museum is for.

~Neil Macgregor

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The deciphering of ancient scripts changed forever the way Europeans were able to imagine the story of humanity, destroying centuries of received authority about the past with repercussions as important for our understanding of time and history as the geological studies of the same period.

~Neil Macgregor

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The British Museum was founded with a civic purpose: to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threats to our liberty.

~Neil Macgregor

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Saddam Hussein was fascinated by ancient Babylon and Assyria. He made money available to protect and develop the great archaeological sites. The great achievements of Mesopotamian civilisation were pressed into the service of the Ba'athist regime.

~Neil Macgregor

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Biography

Nationality: British

Type: Historian

Born: June 16th, 1946

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