Monumental Legacy Quotes

Our efforts to preserve and protect the Alamo are first and foremost about preserving and protecting the story of the battle itself.

I will make a prophecy that may now sound peculiar. In fifty years Lincoln's name will be inscribed close to Washington's on this Republic's roll of honor.

Art is forever.

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.

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

Washington and Lincoln mean as much to us as any two men could mean to a civilization, a people, and age, but I told Mr. Coolidge when he dedicated this monument that this rock is being carved with a monument that will outlive our government.

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

With monuments as with men, position means everything.

Our horizon is the creation of a noble society to which, like the medieval builder of those glorious cathedrals, you will have added your conception, your artful piece of stone.

To avoid a future of war, crime, and bankruptcy, the individual must begin to plan his own destiny, and the best source for the necessary information comes down to us through the writings of the ancients. The greatest knowledge of all time should be available ... in a book that would be a monument, not merely a coffin.

I remember someone once asked Jack Kennedy why he was paying such close attention to the renovation of the square across from the White House, and he said, 'It may be the only thing my presidency is remembered for.'

Memorials become relics if they do not stir our modern conscience.

Each of us is carving a stone, erecting a column, or cutting a piece of stained glass in the construction of something much bigger than ourselves.

What are the characteristics of today's world so that one may recognize it by them?" It pays pensions and borrows money: credit and monuments.

… history is that which transforms documents into monuments

Rome is a place almost worn out by being looked at, a city collapsing under the weight of reference.

That a nation's statuary will reflect beliefs and attitudes that are no longer current or congenial hardly needs arguing. In most instances, it doesn't at all imply a continuing reverence.

All states need to hallow themselves with the dignity of the past.

A monument should be singular. Fate and happenstance have endowed this democracy with a constellation of remarkably varied and aesthetically impressive representations of our national adventure, and this endowment should be enlarged with care.

The Smithsonian museums are among this country's most endearing treasures and I look forward to helping maintain and enhance their coveted works of art.

What legacy can I leave behind to everybody that they will remember me?

Societies need heroes. So we travel to places where the revisionists cannot dismantle the great.

We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.

If I'm taking a picture of Brancusi's grave, I know that there's something of him, of his mortal remains, beneath my feet, and there's something beautiful about that.

Think about what happens when architecture becomes ruins. All you have left are some little columns on a cliff, but it's still such an overwhelming experience that you could say architecture is that which makes ruins beautiful.