31 Quotes by Robert M. Edsel

No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past."— British Major Ronald Balfour of the Monuments Men

But he had sold his soul, and that is something you can never repurchase at any price.

The thought came back to him, as it often did: To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won … it was unheard of, but that was exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do.

Destiny is not one push, she thought as she waited to cross a quiet street on that cold Paris evening years later, but a thousand small moments that through insight and hard work you line up in the right direction, like the magnet does the metal shavings.

I suppose the stern and the cruel ones rule the world. If so, I shall be content to try to live each day within the limits of my conscience and let great plaudits go to those who are willing to pay the price for it.

Here, Mortimer Wheeler thought, is power. And a reminder of our mortality.

The skilled observer, not the machine, was the essence of conservation.

As he later explained to Monuments Man Bernie Taper over drinks in a Berlin apartment, 'There's one good things about being in the bomb disposal unit: No superior officer is ever looking over your shoulder.

If the Nazis discovered they could push you, they would push you to your death. You had to be too much trouble to make it easy, but not so much they grew tired of you.