Memorials Quotes

Only a dead nation remembers its heroes when they die. Real nations respect them when they are alive.

I would much rather be asked, why I do not have one, than why I do have one.

[President] McKinley gave [Lt. Andrew Sommers] Rowan a letter to be delivered to [General Calixto] Garcia: Rowan took the letter and did not ask, "Where is he at?" By the eternal, there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college in the land. It is not book learning that young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust to act promptly, concentrate their energies, do the thing—"carry a message to Garcia.

… the whole earth is the sepulcher of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives.

If you're going to come to D.C. and it's your first time here, see the view from the bottom of the Washington Monument, looking out over the Reflecting Pool to the Lincoln. And see the Jefferson Memorial. It's so beautiful and such a part of the history of the city.

When you go home, tell them of us and say, “For tomorrow these gave their today.”

The struggle between good and evil never ends no matter how great the victory. Anti-Spain was routed, but it is not dead.

They only name things after you when you're dead or really old.

I didn't expect to find much visible trace of the American war in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are too hard-bitten to dwell on it, and they've sanded away all but the outcroppings of history - the museums, the memorials.

I think I needed to really move past my first public work as memorialist, and be equally balanced. It's a bit unusual, to be working between the architecture, the art, and what I would say is a synthesis, the memorials - they're problem solving, but it's very symbolic. You get this triangle; I need to be balanced with those three. They're all equally a part of who I am. I love how different they are, and yet they're coming out the same thing, whatever it is.

Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.

To the memory of the man, first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.

But monument themselves memorials need.

There are too many war museums.

Bray is where I live; it's a seaside resort. It's a nice place to walk up there and stuff, on the coast. There's crosses along on top of it.

Mankind, devising some consolation for the frail and precarious duration of human life, have thought by the erection of monuments to glorify the memories of their ancestors with immortal honors. Some have employed the vivid delineations and colors of painting; some have carved statues from lifeless blocks of wood; while others, by engraving their inscriptions deep on tablets and monuments, have thought to transmit the virtues of those whom they honored to perpetual remembrance.

Our public monuments are memorials to the Enlightenment.

If I have done any honorable exploit, that is my monument; but if I have done none, all your statues will signify nothing.

The accounting of the sacrifice is, more than anything else, the attitude toward war memorials in our time.

In Washington DC, most of the honest and courageous people are statues.

May a monument be erected to me in your hearts, as it is to you in mine.

The war in vietnam threatened to tear our society apart, and the political and philosophical disagreements that separated each side continue, to some extent. It's been said that these memorials reflect a hunger for healing.

I’m not blind or deaf to the fact that there are those who feel this is a ceremony that should not take place.

Sadly, a prize for peace is a rarity in this world. Most nations have monuments or memorials to war, bronze salutations to heroic battles, archways of triumph. But peace has no parade, no pantheon of victory.

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours... You, the mothers, who sent your sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.