You may go from the Battery to Harlem, and in our monuments and statues of public men you will see the slavish adherence to Greek and Roman ideals, from which our artists cannot get away.
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.
There are thousands of Ten Commandments plaques or monuments all over the country, and lawsuits to remove them have popped up in more than a dozen states.
It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist’s studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.
Monuments and archaeological pieces serve as testimonies of man’s greatness and establish a dialogue between civilizations showing the extent to which human beings are linked.
It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists – Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.
‘Monuments Men’ is not a docudrama. It’s not a documentary.
I’m thrilled of the acceptance I get abroad. The people are so hearty, warm and grateful and I feel privileged having seen so many countries and some of the greatest monuments.
The Greeks, the Italians, and the Indians, from whom we get our ideas, erect monuments to ideas; we erect ours to men, and of such monuments we have an oversupply.
Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved.
The poets’ scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.
Nearly every president in the past 100 years has declared national monuments, from Teddy Roosevelt creating the Grand Canyon National Monument to George W. Bush preserving 10 islands and 140,000 square miles of ocean waters in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
People should have freedom in their pilgrimages and tours. They should come and visit historical monuments and sites – let’s say the sites around Iran – where they can easily engage in wide- scale contacts with others.
President Theodore Roosevelt, who signed the Antiquities Act into law, created 18 monuments, including the Grand Canyon and Olympic National Park in Washington, totaling more than a million acres.
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