Quotes by Archaeologists

History is for human self-knowledge…the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
R.G. Collingwood
My company has had a safety program for 150 years. The program was instituted as a result of a French law requiring an explosives manufacturer to live on the premises with his family.
Crawford Greenwalt
There could be no honor in a sure success but much might be wrested from a sure defeat.
T.E. Lawrence
If you are afraid for your future you don't have a present.
James Petersen
Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.
C.W. Ceram
He that will learn to pray let him go to sea.
George Edward Herbert
Do what thy manhood bids thee do.
Sir Richard Burton
A wise man cares not for what he cannot have.
George Edward Herbert
Poverty is no sin.
George Edward Herbert
Wouldst thou both eat they cake and have it?
George Edward Herbert
Fly the pleasure that bites tomorrow.
George Edward Herbert
Steal the hog and give the feet for alms.
George Edward Herbert
Most of us can as we choose make of this world either a palace or a prison.
Sir John Lubbock
Sweets are good for the nerves.
Margarete Bieber
The mouse that hath but one hole is quickly taken.
George Edward Herbert
Do what thy manhood bids thee do.
Sir Richard Burton
A wise man cares not for what he cannot have.
George Edward Herbert
He that will learn to pray let him go to Sea.
George Edward Herbert
Poverty is no sin.
George Edward Herbert
Wouldst thou both eat they cake and have it?
George Edward Herbert
Fly the pleasure that bites tomorrow.
George Edward Herbert
Steal the hog and give the feet for alms.
George Edward Herbert
Most of us can as we choose make of this world either a palace or a prison.
Sir John Lubbock
Sweets are good for the nerves.
Margarete Bieber
The mouse that hath but one hole is quickly taken.
George Edward Herbert
Show me a liar and I will show thee a thief.
George Edward Herbert
The lion is not so fierce as they paint him.
George Edward Herbert
No hope no action.
Peter Levi
The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.
John Still
You must lose a fly to catch a trout.
George Edward Herbert
A series of failures may culminate in the best possible result.
Gisela Richter
He that hath lost his credit is dead to the world.
George Edward Herbert
A cheerful look makes a dish a feast
George Edward Herbert
If you are afraid for your future you don't have a present.
James Petersen
Do well and right and let the world sink.
George Edward Herbert
Let twelve angels come into being to rule over chaos and the underworld." And look, from the cloud there appeared an angel whose face flashed with fire and whose appearance was defiled with blood. His name was Nebro, which means in translation 'rebel'; others call him Yaldabaoth.
Rodolphe Kasser
In the field of Egyptian mathematics Professor Karpinski of the University of Michigan has long insisted that surviving mathematical papyri clearly demonstrate the Egyptians' scientific interest in pure mathematics for its own sake. I have now no doubt that Professor Karpinski is right, for the evidence of interest in pure science, as such, is perfectly conclusive in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus.
James Henry Breasted
...some student asked if he [Larry Summers] didn’t have essentially the same relationship with Bob Rubin. Wasn’t Summer’s opposition to capital controls just a sop to Wall Street banks, which wanted to recoup their risky investments regardless of how doing so affected the country in which they had invested? “Summers just lost it,” said one audience member, a business school student. “he looked at the person and said, “you don’t know what you’re talking about and how dare you ask this question of the president of Harvard?
Richard Bradley
Now everything is sold on the Internet and anybody at all who doesn't know a thing can give their opinion.
Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
Once upon a time an Athenian princesss named Prokne was wed to Tereus, king of the barbarous Thracians of the north. When Prokne's unfortunate sister, Philomela, came for a visit, Tereus fell madly in love with the girl locked her away and raped her, then cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling anyone of the crime. Philomela, however, wove into a cloth the story of her misfortune. When Prokne, receiving the cloth, understood what had befallen, she freed her sister, killed her own son, Itys, whom she had borne to Tereus, and served the child up to his father at a feast--the vilest revenge she could think of. When Tereus discovered the truth, in wrath he pursued the two sisters, thinking to kill them, but the gods transformed all three into birds: Tereus into the hoopoe (a large, crested bird with a daggerlike beak), Philomela into the swallow, which can only twitter unintelligibly, and Prokne into the nightingale, which spends the night singing 'Itys Itys!' in mourning for her dead son. All these birds have reddish spots, it is said, from getting spattered with the blood of the child....It is interesting in our purposes because it shows in yet another way the great importance that clothmaking had in women's lives, becoming central to their mythology as well.
Elizabeth Wayland Barber
Life moved, as inconstant and fickle as Wind Baby, frolicking, sleeping, weeping, but never truly still. Never solid or finished. Always like water flowing from one place to the next. Seed and fruit. Rain and drought, everything traveled in a gigantic circle, an eternal process of becoming something new. But we rarely saw it. Humans tended to see only frozen moments, not the flow of things.
Kathleen O'Neal Gear
The Howeitat spread out along the cliffs to return the peasants' fire. This manner of going displeased Auda, the old lion, who raged that a mercenary village folk should dare to resist their secular masters, the Abu Tayi. So he jerked his halter, cantered his mare down the path, and rode out plain to view beneath the easternmost houses of the village. There he reined in, and shook a hand at them, booming in his wonderful voice: 'Dogs, do you not know Auda?' When they realized it was that implacable son of war their hearts failed them, and an hour later Sherif Nasir in the town-house was sipping tea with his guest the Turkish Governor, trying to console him for the sudden change of fortune.
T.E. Lawrence
Darkly, deeply, beautifully blue - the sky
George Byron Gordon
We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell dusty.
T.E. Lawrence
Among many other things, genius implies the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple, and to recognize inclusive structural principals.
C.W. Ceram
Increase Mather, President of Harvard University, in his treatise on Remarkable Providences, insists that the smell of herbs alarms the Devil and that medicine expels him. Such beliefs have probably even now not wholly disappeared from among us.
James Henry Breasted
The seat of consciousness and intelligence was from the earliest times regarded by the Egyptians as both the heart and the bowels or abdomen. Our surgeon, however, has observed the fact that injuries to the brain affect other parts of the body, especially in his experience the lower limbs. He notes the drag or shuffle of one foot, presumably the partial paralysis resulting from a cranial wound, and the ancient commentator carefully explains the meaning of the obsolete word used for "shuffle.
James Henry Breasted
Here we see the word "brain" occurring for the first time in human speech, as far as it is known to us; and in discussing injuries affecting the brain, we note the surgeon's effort to delimit his terms as he selects for specialization a series of common and current words to designate three degrees of injury to the skull indicated in modern surgery by the terms "fracture", "compound fracture," and "compound comminuted fracture," all of which the ancient commentator carefully explains.
James Henry Breasted
Speechlessness, however, affirmed in the diagnosis, is carefully based on the facts of the examination, as we see by rendering the statements concerned, just as they stand in examination and diagnosis: "If thou examinest a man having a wound in the temple, ...; if thou ask of him concerning his malady and he speak not to thee; ...; thou shouldst say concerning him, 'One having a wound in his temple, ... (and) he is speechless'.
James Henry Breasted
The attention given to the side of the head which has received the injury, in connection with a specific reference to the side of the body nervously affected, is in itself evidence that in this case the ancient surgeon was already beginning observations on the localization of functions in the brain.
James Henry Breasted
It strikes me you might place your gifts better. Why should you send powder to a ruffian who will use it to commit crimes? But for the deplorable weakness every one here seems to have for the bandits, they would have disappeared out of Corsica long ago.""The worst men in our country are not those who are 'in the country.'""Give them bread, if it so please you. But I will not have you supply them with ammuni
Prosper Mérimée
In peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade…. The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance. – T. E. Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T.E. Lawrence
We are not going to reduce energy capture unless catastrophe forces us to—which means that the only way to avoid running out of resources, poisoning the planet, or both, will be by tapping into renewable, clean power.
Ian Morris
By 1870, Britain’s steam engines generated 4 million horsepower, equivalent to the work of 40 million men, who—if industry had still depended on muscles—would have eaten more than three times Britain’s entire wheat output.
Ian Morris
Author says he suffered from both "a craving to be famous" and "a horror of being known to like being known.
T.E. Lawrence
Nothing to say. I used to be a ghostwriter for a publisher.’‘Medieval stuff?’‘Eighty-page love stories. You have this guy, untrustworthy but good in bed, and this girl, radiant but innocent. In the end they fall madly in love and it’s incredibly boring. The story doesn’t say when they split up.’‘Of course not,’ said Mathias
Fred Vargas
We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.
T.E. Lawrence
Of valid economics pre-dating the Power Age (steam and electricity), there remains not a vestige. Of valid economics pre-dating the intensive and extensive use of electricity there will soon exist only rags and tatters. We still have to thank Adam Smith for insisting 'Consumption is the sole end and purpose of production;' but the old form of the law of demand and supply is outmoded, since supply has become practically inexhaustible.
Harriet Boyd Hawes
A person who has the power to take a life, should have the intelligence to choose not to.
Christian Ekström
There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologist—musical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were worn. … No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.
Mary Leakey