Quotes by Neil MacGregor

About Neil MacGregor:

Robert Neil MacGregor is a British art historian and museum director. He was the Editor of the Burlington Magazine from 1981 to 1987, the Director of the National Gallery, London, from 1987 to 2002, and was appointed Director of the British Museum in 2002. He has presented three television series on art and the BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects, which aired in 2010 and later became a best-selling book.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

It is, as we know, the victors who write the history, especially when only the victors know how to write.

Neil MacGregor

For the Greeks, there was no single canonical version of creation, but a number of overlapping stories.

Neil MacGregor

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

Thanks to the unprecedented reach of British navigation, London in the early 18th century was not just the emporium of the world, it was the first place in which it was possible to assemble artifacts from around the world and allow people to study th...

Neil MacGregor

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 ...

Neil MacGregor

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

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

Our collective memories are welcoming places, and one image, that of Jesus, has absorbed and appropriated elements of other traditions and aspirations in order to shape our communal remembering.

Neil MacGregor

There is not much we can say with absolute confidence about the early church, but we can be fairly sure that the first Christians would not have dreamed of making a likeness of Jesus.

Neil MacGregor

The Louvre stopped buying paintings in 1848, and neither the Metropolitan nor the Hermitage acquire contemporary material.

Neil MacGregor

Objects let you tell a narrative that encompasses everybody. Texts don't.

Neil MacGregor

The focus in the Western pictorial tradition is on the body of Christ, the bit you can paint, the Nativity and the infancy, but above all the Passion, where you can find images for every stage and every moment.

Neil MacGregor

In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn't fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effec...

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 uni...

Neil MacGregor

If you are born in 1564, your dislocation from your parents' experience is very profound. You are the first generation who will have had all your religious experience in English, the first to have a countryman circumnavigate the globe. All the power ...

Neil MacGregor

The distinction between a gallery and a museum is enormous. The gallery is about looking at a thing of beauty; the purpose of the activity is an aesthetic response. The museum is actually about the object that lets you get into somebody else's life.

Neil MacGregor

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 th...

Neil MacGregor

It is a standing source of astonishment and amusement to visitors that the British Museum has so few British things in it: that it is a museum about the world as seen from Britain rather than a history focused on these islands.

Neil MacGregor

Because of the long, long history of British shipping, immigration, trade, empire, missionaries, you can have a better shot at telling a worldwide story in the British Museum's collection than any other. Britain has been more connected with the rest ...

Neil MacGregor

The collapse of the Tower of Babel is perhaps the central urban myth. It is certainly the most disquieting. In Babylon, the great city that fascinated and horrified the Biblical writers, people of different races and languages, drawn together in purs...

Neil MacGregor

Author Bio

  • NameNeil MacGregor
  • DescriptionBritish art historian
  • BornJune 16, 1946
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionArt Historian; Author