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But we cannot rely on memorials and museums alone. We can tell ourselves we will never forget and we likely won't. But we need to make sure that we teach history to those who never had the opportunity to remember in the first place.

Every museum is full of nice things. That's the opposite of before. It was important things or serious things. Now we have interesting things.

In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.

I think it's good that we're sometimes reminded of important events in history.

One of the brilliant things about Britain is the way you've managed to save old things but to keep using them - that they've not just become museums the way they do in the United States.

A museum has to renew its collection to be alive, but that does not mean we give on important old works.

Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place in museums; others, we take for walks.

The concept of preserving history, collating full archives, making them as usable as possible so the public have access to them, I really feel that it allows the public an ability to engage with their own history.

Indeed, we might all forget where we have been if we didn't have somebody to assemble and arrange the little blocks called facts from which history is constructed, artfully or less so.

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.