Jillian

“ancestors.… If these things are lost or broken or destroyed, we lose a valuable part of our knowledge about our forefathers. No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it. —British Monuments Man Ronald Balfour, draft lecture for soldiers, 1944 All”
― Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, And The Greatest Treasure Hunt In History

“fifty million loved ones who never returned home from the war to rejoin their families or start one of their own; brilliant, creative contributions never made to our world because scientists, artists, and inventors lost their lives too early or were never born; cultures built over generations reduced to ashes”
― Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, And The Greatest Treasure Hunt In History

“If, in time of peace, our museums and art galleries are important to the community, in time of war they are doubly valuable. For then, when the petty and the trivial fall way and we are face to face with final and lasting values, we… must summon to our defense all our intellectual and spiritual resources. We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future. Art is the imperishable and dynamic expression of these aims. It is, and always has been, the visible evidence of the activity of free minds.…”
― Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, And The Greatest Treasure Hunt In History

“Destroying things is much easier than making them.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games