Monuments Quotes

“Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn
And broils roots out the work of masonry,
Nor mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till judgement that yourself arise,
You in this, and dwell in lovers eyes.”
― William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“For all the splendor of their monuments, the builders have vanished.”
― Cait Stevenson, How to Slay a Dragon: A Fantasy Hero's Guide to the Real Middle Ages

“One can tell a great deal about a country by what it remembers. By what graces the wall of its museums. And what monuments have privileged placement in parks or central traffic intersections. And what holidays and patriotic songs are the bane and balm to generations of school children. Yet one learns even more about a nation by what it forgets. What moments of evil, disappointment, and defeat are downplayed or eliminated from the national narratives. Often in the United States the issues of race and the centrality of African American culture are given short shrift in textbooks, popular chronicles, and national memories.”
― Lonnie G. Bunch III, A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump

“The architect, the sculptor, are highly interested that men should look to their art—to their hand, for a continuance of their being; and, therefore, I should wish to see well-designed, well-executed monuments; not sown up and down by themselves at random, but erected all in a single spot, where they can promise themselves endurance. Inasmuch as even the good and the great are contented to surrender the privilege of resting in person in the churches, we may, at least, erect there or in some fair hall near the burying-place, either monuments or monumental writings.”
― Goethe, Les Affinités électives

“The holy well was before them. If it hadn't been marked as special, the place where the water came to the surface, fresh and clean and clear, would have been easily missed. But long ago, someone had built a stone border around it and added a vertical font with a woman's worn face on it. Water poured from her open mouth into the pool below. Little white moss flowers grew all around it.
A few yards away was a craggy standing stone. The stone was twice as tall as Merida and covered all over with carved spirals. On the first day of spring solstice, the sun lit up a perfect trail of light along the stone as it rose; quite magical. Merida used to ride Angus to the stone when she was first learning all the wilds of DunBroch; it was so impressive that it had taken her several visits to realize that the holy well, not the stone, was the reason this path was kept clear.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Bravely

“When there is no process, people lose hope that their voices will be heard. And then they take action, even if there's no legal route to do so. But this action might not be the one they really want to take. Perhaps they want to have a community-wide conversation about a monument or make some changes to it. Understanding and reconciliation can happen in many ways - but when authorities refuse to listen to calls for removal, some people will think they have no choice but to topple a monument.”
― Erin L. Thompson, Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments

“Some of those who say they are worried about erasing history are really objecting to decisions about monuments being taken down by a small group of people, whether protesters or officials. Ideally, communities as a whole should decide, but you cannot impose this as a requirement without the existence of a real process for having these conversations. Today, what we are truly in danger of losing is not history but rather the chance to use monuments, whether fallen or still standing, as paths to get to a better future”
― Erin L. Thompson, Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments

“Build no monuments to the living, for they may yet disgrace the stone.”
― Annonimus

“Removing statues in many ways is about finding a more accurate history, a history that is more keeping with the best scholarship that we have out there. So for me, it is about making sure we don’t forget what those statues symbolize. It’s about pruning them, removing some, contextualizing others and recognizing that there is nothing wrong with a country recognizing that its identity is evolving over time. And as this identity evolves, so does what it remembers. So it does what it celebrates.”
― Lonnie G. Bunch III

“To select only monuments supresses at one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the present, that is, nothing historical, and as a consequence, the monuments themselves become undecipherable, therefore senseless. What is to be seen is thus constantly in the process of vanishing, and the Guide becomes, through an operation common to all mystifications, the very opposite of what it advertises, an agent of blindness.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“People value monuments above men, and signs above works.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance

“In that way, they [monuments] are a reflection of the times in which they are erected as much as they are a reflection of the times they seek to commemorate. You can think of them, Alderman went on, as monuments to the power of the people who erect them, rather than as solely of the person depicted.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Symbol-laden and technologically-driven histories of building were historically interwoven and conceptually compatible. National Socialism adopted just this convergence of the symbolic and the technological as a program, and this made it impossible ever after to pursue such a program.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“And yet, even the people who built the greatest marvels in the world could vanish without a trace. Those who dared to create monuments meant to last forever had still crumbled to dust. And in their silence, the pyramids proclaimed “You will crumble, too.”
― Cait Stevenson, How to Slay a Dragon: A Fantasy Hero's Guide to the Real Middle Ages

“Monuments are never built on flimsy foundations nor weak grounds.”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“Journalist Tony Horwitz describes its laser show as an unfortunate mix of Coca-Cola, the Beatles, the Atlanta Braves, and Elvis sining "Dixie," followed by the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Television ads end with the inclusive slogan, "Stone Mountain: A Different Day for Everyone." Eventually the desire for everyone's dollar may accomplish what the physical elements cannot: eradicating Stone Mountain as a Confederate-KKK Shrine.”
― James Loewen

“The historical witness is clear: as confederate symbols migrated from cemeteries and veterans’ parades, they became less about honoring the past and more about upholding white supremacy in the present. In fact, the relationship is inversely proportional. The further the distance from the cemetery and the past, the more nakedly obvious their role in asserting white supremacy becomes.”
― Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

“Displaying a monument that claims white people control America in an institution that is controlled by white people merely reinforces its message.”
― Erin L. Thompson, Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments

“Why the push to be "immortal"? No one can outlast the stars. Not the monuments, films, books, and all the receptacles of memory humans try so hard to build like so many anthills in a giant forest.”
― Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

“Our monuments were put up by people who wanted to freeze American society into place, with themselves at the top. But we, unlike the stone and metal figures on a monument, can decide that it is time to move.”
― Erin L. Thompson, Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments

“Michael King was a young preacher with horn-rimmed glasses and a close-cropped beard and mustache. "The Bible says, if eating meat offends your brother, eat meat no more," he said. "Worship of the Confederacy offends me."

"When I asked why, he walked me to the Confederate monument, which occupied a median strip on Salisbury's busiest street. The 1909 memorial depicted a bronze angel cradling a dying rebel soldier and holding forth a laurel crown. Chiseled on the granite base was the Confederate motto, Deo Vindice. With God As Our Defender.

"What's the message here?" King said. "God dispatched an angel to ferry this brave rebel to heaven. As a Christian pastor, I got a problem with that. The whole notion that God was involved with one race putting down another, that's going against the grain of a Christian nation. God ain't with racism or anything to do with subdividing people.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“...Ward felt the tale carried a redeeming message. "What were they putting up monuments to in the first place? A lot of Southerners dying for nothing. And look at us now, still arguing about the rebel flag. To me, that says we're still a lost cause in a lot of ways." She dumped an armful of old documents in the canoe and turned off the lights. "Maybe the message of the whole mix-up is that we shouldn't make such a fuss about these old symbols. Forget it. There's real things to worry about.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“I sat at the [Confederate] monument for a while. For the past several weeks people had been talking to me about "heritage." But, like the flag, this obviously meant very different things to different people. For the Sons of the Confederate Veterans I'd met in North Carolina, it meant the heritage of their ancestors' valor and sacrifice. For Bud Sharpe, it was the heritage of segregation and its dismantling over the past forty years. Was it possible to honor one heritage without upholding the other?”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Robert Penn Warren, who watched the [Jefferson Davis] monument's construction as a child, later recalled the bemusement he felt as this "immobile thrust of concrete" soared above his native soil. Remembrance of the Confederacy, he wrote, "had never been of burning importance in Guthrie, where to a certain number of contemporary citizens the Civil War seemed to have been fought for the right to lynch without legal interference.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“The question loomed again—massively so—a few minutes later as we strolled down Richmond's most famous, or infamous, street: Monument Avenue. The boulevard was lined with statues of the Confederacy's Holy Trinity—Davis, Lee and Jackson—and of two of their ablest lieutenants, Jeb Stuart and Matthew Fontaine Maury, a naval commander and brilliant oceanographer....

The scale of Monument Avenue also amplified the weirdness of the whole enterprise. After all, Davis and Lee and Jackson and Stuart weren't national heroes. In the view of many Americans, they were precisely the opposite: leaders of a rebellion against the nation—separatists at best, traitors at worst. None of those honored were native Richmonders. And their mission failed. They didn't call it the Lost Cause for nothing. I couldn't think of another city in the world that lined its streets with stone leviathans honoring failed rebels against the state.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“War is the
Congress of adolescents, love in a mask,
Bestial and easy, issueless,
Or gets a man of bronze. No beating heart
Until the casual man can see the Angel's face”
― John Berryman, The Dispossessed

“We drove past the modest obelisk marking Jeb Stuart's grave and then to a life-sized bronze of Jefferson Davis overlooking the James River. The monument's inscription encapsulated the militant victimology that prevailed in the post-War South: "Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Whatever one felt about the Confederates, their enshrinement on Monument Avenue was historic in its own right, a unique museum piece of the Lost Cause mentality.

Still others gave this rationale a political twist. "[Arthur] Ashe isn't a soldier and his statue will barely reach [Robert E.] Lee's saddle," said Wayne Byrd, who headed a chapter of the Heritage Preservation Association, a pro-rebel flag group I'd encountered elsewhere in the South. "This statue will trivialize Ashe and be disrespectful of Confederate-Americans who hallow the other men on that street."

In the name of inclusiveness and sensitivity—both to Ashe's memory and to "Confederate-Americans," a heretofore neglected minority—Byrd proposed memorializing still another ignored group: black Confederates. Recent scholarship suggested that some slaves and free blacks fought in the rebel ranks, though their numbers and motivation were unclear. In effect, the Heritage Preservation Association, one of America's most politically incorrect groups, was trying to claim politically correct motives while making a gesture that was precisely the opposite. By honoring blacks who took up arms in defense of their white masters, the group had found a sly way to disassociate the Cause from slavery.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“During a break, I approached Byrd in the hall and asked what he meant by the term Confederate-American. "A Confederate-American—then and now—is simply anyone who's against big government," he said. "We as Southern Americans just want to be left alone."

"Yeah, the South wanted to be left alone—to oppress people!" a long-haired man shouted.

"It was not about slavery!" a man with a rebel-flag T-shirt barked back. "It was states' rights!"

"Exactly. The right to own slaves. Tear the statues and plantations down!"

"Should we tear down the Pyramids because they were built by slaves? And what about Washington and Jefferson? They owned slaves. Should we tear down memorials to them?"

I noticed a white man in jeans and duckbill cap standing off to the side, smoking a cigarette and shaking his head as the others shouted. Wallace Faison was a peanut farmer from a small town near the North Carolina line. "For me it's not political at all," he said quietly. "The South—we lost. I feel like I lost, too. Monument Avenue is like that last Valhalla, that spiritual place I can go. It's crazy, I can't explain it, but that's how I feel.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Back in the council chamber, we stayed to hear one more speaker, an accountant in thick glasses and a dark charcoal suit. Jim Slicer was a native of Washington, D.C., where Civil War statues were what he called “just men on horses” that no one cared about. “I’ve been here in Richmond for six years and I still don’t get it,” he said. “To me, having the principal Richmond monuments dedicated to the Lost Cause is like saying we’re dedicated to no hope, no future. It’s like having a monument to unrequited love.”

The question for Slicer wasn’t whether Ashe belonged on a pedestal beside Davis, Lee and Jackson, but rather, “Do they belong? Does Monument Avenue?”

As Slicer headed out of the chamber, I asked what alternative he’d propose. “I’d do the same thing with Lee and Davis that the Russians did with statues of Stalin and Lenin,” he said. “Take them down or at least don’t add to their ranks. Stop honoring wrong.” As for [Arthur] Ashe, he’d propose a whole new street to celebrate the tennis star and other modern Richmonders. “Make it an avenue of the future, not the past.”

He chuckled, adding, “Of course, it will never happen. This town can’t shake its past. I’ve learned that much from my six years in Richmond.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War