Quotes About Monuments

Excuses are the tools with which persons with no purpose in view build for themselves great monuments of nothing.

Marina Warner's Monuments and Maidens explains how it comes about that individual men's names and faces are enshrined in monuments, supported by identical, anonymous (and beautiful) stone women.

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it. [First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801]

it made me think of all the generations who had lived in this City, dashing and scurrying through their lives, some to leave great monuments and dynasties of children, others rushing only to oblivion.

There are far more statues of soldiers out there than there are of civilians.

Who chose burial monuments? Were the wishes of the deceased taken into consideration? It was a subject I'd never considered before.

Monuments are not about history; they are values made visible.

The monuments were not innocuous shrines to history; they were provocative assertions of white supremacy at moments when its defenders felt under threat. Knowing when they were built is part of knowing why they were built.

This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.

In Russia monuments wander around cities in the dark, lose their shoes, fingers, hats, and heads.

Marajó never had the grand public monuments of a Tenochtitlan or a Qosqo, Roosevelt noted, because its leaders "couldn't compel the labor." Nonetheless, she said, Marajó society was "just as orderly and beautiful and complex. The eye-opener was that you didn't need a huge apparatus of state control to have all that.

Four decades later, Samuel Eliot Morison, twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, closed his two-volume European Discovery of America with the succinct claim that Indians had created no lasting monuments or institutions.

Flush with wealth, Tiwanaku city swelled into a marvel of terraced pyramids and grand monuments. Stone breakwaters extended far out into Lake Titicaca, thronged with long-prowed boats made of reeds. With its running water, closed sewers, and gaudily painted walls, Tiwanaku was among the world's most impressive cities.

They build their monuments as if their intent was never to finish them," the Spanish academic Polo de Ondegardo marveled in 1571.

Therefore a man should examine for himself the great piles of superimposed strata, and watch the rivulets bringing down mud, and the waves wearing away the sea-cliffs, in order to comprehend something about the duration of past time, the monuments of which we see all around us.

America has no monuments to ideas; her monuments are erected to individuals.

Are there any monuments built to demagogues? I just don't think so.

There are all kinds of monuments to adults - usually dead and usually white. But we don't often lift up the extraordinary work of children.

Ancient monuments 300 to 1000-plus years old are never 'renovated,' only 'restored,' a distinction that escapes the babus.

Being able to invest in my community and invest in areas that people might not really know about and monuments that people might not know about in their own backyard is a great opportunity.

We must ask ourselves: Are we a confident, forward-looking nation that builds monuments - like DACA - to hope and determination? Or are we a nation that is turned inward, lauding monuments to intolerance and division?

In America, we have holidays and monuments that celebrate heroes from our past, most of whom have legacies that are settled.

Hollywood got into the act, with director Cecil B. DeMille helping erect literally thousands of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments across the nation as part of a promotional campaign for his blockbuster film of the same name.

Even Hollywood got into the act, with director Cecil B. DeMille helping erect literally thousands of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments across the nation as part of a promotional campaign for his blockbuster film of the same name.