You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment. — Paddy Chayefsky
You should definitely visit the Louvre, a world-famous art museum where you can view, at close range, the backs of thousands of other tourists trying to see the Mona Lisa. — Dave Barry
A country that has few museums is both materially poor and spiritually poor...Museums, like theaters and libraries, are a means to freedom. — Wendy Beckett
Museums should be places where you raise questions, not just show stuff. — William Thorsell
When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires. — Banksy
Art should be created for life, not for the museum — Jean Nouvel
I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth. — Lewis H. Lapham
The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. — Paul Cezanne
England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England. — Victor Hugo
It is the clash of two different worlds that makes British-ness unique - we have an aristocratic, noble history, but it is always contrasted with something rebellious. — Christopher Bailey
The Louvre is a good book to consult, but it must only be an intermediary. The real and immense study that must be taken up is the manifold picture of nature. — Paul Cezanne
Short British Museum Quotes
When in a museum, walk slowly but keep walking. — Gertrude Stein
A CD. How quaint. We have these in museums. — Eoin Colfer
We are similar to a museum. My function is to present old masterpieces in modern frames. — Rudolf Bing
Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism — Walter Benjamin
A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world. — Edmond de Goncourt
Designers shouldn’t design for museums any more than mummies should die for them. — Ralph Caplan
Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role. — Dean Acheson
The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends. — Jean Cocteau
Civilization -- a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures. — Malcolm Muggeridge
British Museum Image Quotes
British Culture Quotes
In my view the European culture carries a very heavy responsibility for the creation of Israel... it is a product of both British and Stalin's anti- Semitism, but the British never faced their own complicity in its construction. — Tom Paulin
A genial and cultured Arab, Ameen Rihani, whose English is perfect and whose eloquence is astounding. He will discuss with equal eagerness and knowledge the merits of Picasso or Van Gogh, or the Zionist question, or the British achievements in Arabia. — Kenneth Williams
Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true. — Pete Townshend
They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers. — Michael Lewis
I respect the British a lot - their history, their past, their culture. I think it's beautiful, what they have with the monarchy. — Jean-Marc Vallee
The Irish and British, they love satire, it's a large part of the culture. — Ben Nicholson
The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture. — Nelson Mandela
One of the things which separates British and American culture is the reverence for the flag in American culture. — Mark Lawson
American culture is kind of an international culture, isn't it? British culture is a bit more unique. I think funny things are sort of funny around the world, really. — David Walliams
Even though we were influenced by American culture and music, we like the rest of Europe have been colonized with that in the post-war period. At the same time there's a sense of dirty earthiness and Europeanness and Britishness in it as well. — Stephen Mallinder
British Quotes
His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular. — Idi Amin
On the British Royal Divorce (Charles and Dianna). She is such a sad soul. It is good that it is over. Nobody was happy anyhow. I know I should preach family love and unity, but in their case. . . . — Mother Teresa
The shots that hit me are the last nails to the coffin of british rule in India. — Lala Lajpat Rai
The British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland. — James Connolly
There's something whimsical, satirical, and silly about British humor, which Americans have always enjoyed, and lots of us come over here because we have an audience of people who enjoy it. — Milo Yiannopoulos
The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen's lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire. — Winston Churchill
We always said that our struggle was not only against the British as representatives of colonialism, it was against all the evil that existed in India. The evil of the feudal system, the evil of the system based on caste, the evil of economic injustice. — Indira Gandhi
I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race... If there be a God, I think that what he would like me to do is paint as much of the map of Africa British Red as possible... — Cecil Rhodes
Yes, ruling by fooling, is a great British art with great Irish fools to practice on. — James Connolly
If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum. — Arthur Eddington
Read properly, fewer books than a hundred would suffice for a liberal education. Read superficially, the British Museum Library might still leave the student a barbarian. — Alfred Richard Orage
We have a hieroglyphical inscription in the British Museum as early as the reign of Sevechus of the eighth century before the Christian era, showing that the doctrine of Trinity in Unity already formed part of their religion and that ... the three gods only made one person. — Samuel Sharpe
If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum. — Mikhail Gorbachev
When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask. — C. S. Forester
We went to the British Museum, and I was looking up my family in the books - pages and pages on it. — Nicholas Lea
The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century - it was actually mummified, skin and all - but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire. — Adam Savage
The 'Robben Island Bible' has arrived at the British Museum. It's a garish thing, its cover plastered with pink and gold Hindu images, designed to hide its contents. Within is the finest collection of words generated by human intelligence: the complete works of William Shakespeare. — Daniel Hannan
If there was a little room somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke, I believe I should become a museum man. — J. B. Priestley
Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market. — Mark Twain
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
Evolution writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum. — Fred Reed
In my experience, Cupid's arrows rarely strike two people with the same definition of cleanliness. One partner usually feels like he or she is being asked to live in a furniture exhibit in the British Museum. The other partner remains convinced that he or she is forced to contend with the human version of Hurricane Gilbert. — Margo Kaufman
If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum. — Sir Arthur Eddington
London has fine museums, the British Library is one of the greatest library institutions in the world... It's got everything you want, really. — David Attenborough
I shot for French and British Vogue. The British Vogue one featured clothes by Chloe and was shot at Highgate and the John Soane Museum. It came out much better in my opinion. I only did one day and was working with my own make-up and hair people and a model who I've known for years. — Nan Goldin
We are devastated to learn of the death of Alexander McQueen, one of the greatest talents of his generation. He brought a uniquely British sense of daring and aesthetic fearlessness to the global stage of fashion. In such a short career, Alexander McQueen's influence was astonishing - from street style, to music culture and the world's museums. His passing marks an insurmountable loss. — Anna Wintour
You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter... you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person. — John Ruskin
I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum. — Kenneth Clark
I've heard the sound of 70 condoms being scraped over the floor at the British Museum. It feels like being an adventurer. Why would you stay in your living room if you could go out and experience things no one's ever experienced? — Herbert
To look at and properly appreciate the British Museum is the work of a lifetime. — M. E. W. Sherwood
When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum. — Anthony Trollope
Yesterday I visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart. The present is burdened too much with the past. — Nathaniel Hawthorne
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
[On the British Museum:] It was manifestly impossible to read all the books in that huge, gloomy structure, but I made a good try and accumulated a fund of useless information guaranteed to cast a pall over any dinner table. — Elsa Maxwell
It seems to me one cannot sit down in that place [the Round Reading room of the British Museum] without a heart full of grateful reverence. I own to have said my grace at the table, and to have thanked Heaven for my English birthright, freely to partake of these beautiful books, and speak the truth I find there. — William Makepeace Thackeray
If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel. — Arthur Eddington
For all the casual slurs about 'cultural imperialism', British imperialists were more interested in other cultures than anybody before or since, and, if they hadn't dug it up and taken care of it, we'd know hardly anything about the ancient world. What's important about a nation's past is not what it keeps walled up in the museum but what it keeps outside, living and breathing as every citizen's inheritance. — Mark Steyn
I’d been to the British museum before. In fact I’ve been in more museums than I like to admit—it makes me sound like a total geek. [That’s Sadie in the background, yelling I am a total geek. Thanks, Sis.] — Rick Riordan
I guess it started in London, the night our dad blew up the British museum. — Rick Riordan
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