Monuments Men Quotes & Sayings

Monuments, like men, submit to fate. — Alexander Pope

If you want to feel the life and the body of great men who are long gone, go to their tombs or monuments; if you want to understand the real life and the wisdom of great men who are long gone, go to their libraries! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

There is nothing antithetical in American history, culture, or traditions to teamwork. Teams were important in America's history - wagon trains conquered the West, men working together on the assembly line in American industry conquered the world, a successful national strategy and a lot of teamwork put an American on the moon first (and thus fare, last). But American mythology extols only the individual ... In America, halls of fame exist for almost every conceivable activity, but nowhere do Americans raise monuments in praise of teamwork. — Lester Thurow

I would say hard times call for hard measures, but the Constitution is even a greater treasure than these monuments and the great men who inspired them. — Kenneth Eade

They were looking at videos, and the woman was giggling quietly, as they often do in porn stores, unable to believe what they're seeing, the monuments men have built to vaginas and to the very notion of sex. — Drew Nellins Smith

If one destroyed in museums and libraries, if one hurled down on the flagstones before the churches all the works and all the monuments of art that religions have inspired, what would remain of the great dreams of humanity? To give to men that portion of hope and illusion without which they cannot live, such is the reason for the existence of gods, heroes, and poets. During fifty years science appeared to undertake this task. But science has been compromised in hearts hungering after the ideal, because it does not dare to be lavish enough of promises, because it cannot lie — Gustave Le Bon

Monuments make momentous men immortal, but more memorable are mortal men making mere moments monumental. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Man's drive for self-expression, which over the centuries has built his monuments, does not stay within its bounds; the creations which yesterday were detested and the obscene become the classics of today. — Mathew Tobriner

Brave deeds are the monuments of brave men. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Marina Warner's Monuments and Maidens explains how it comes about that individual men's names and faces are enshrined in monuments, supported by identical, anonymous (and "beautiful") stone women. — Naomi Wolf

If the finding of Coines, Medals, Urnes, and other Monuments of famous Persons, or Towns, or Utensils, be admitted for unquestionable Proofs, that such Persons or things have, in former Times, had a being, certainly those Petrifactions may be allowed to be of equal Validity and Evidence, that there have been formerly such Vegetables or Animals. These are truly Authentick Antiquity not to be counterfeited, the Stamps, and Impressions, and Characters of Nature that are beyond the Reach and Power of Humane Wit and Invention, and are true universal Characters legible to all rational Men. — Robert Hooke

'Monuments Men' is a movie ... I don't want to say for grown-ups, because some young folks could appreciate it, too. But if you're expecting 'Transformers,' you're going to be disappointed. — Grant Heslov

Forget the buildings and the monuments. Let the softness of dark come in, all those light-years between stars and planets. Cities were the works of men but the earth before and after those cities, outside and beneath and around them, was the dream of a sleeping leviathan--it was god sleeping there and dreaming, the same god that was time and transfiguration. From whatever dreamed the dream at the source, atom or energy, flowed all the miracles of evolution--tiger, tiger burning bright, the massive whales in the deep, luminescent specters in their mystery. The pearls that were their eyes, their tongues that were wet leaves, their bodies that were the bodies of the fantastic.

Spectacular bestiaries of heaven, the limbs and tails of the gentle and the fearsome, silent or raging at will . . . they could never be known in every detail and they never should be. — Lydia Millet

In their purest form myths, not unlike tragedy, are perhaps the most important moment in the troubled history of Mexican civilization. The cement of dreams, the architecture of language, made of images and rhythms which respond to and harmonize with each other through time and space, their wisdom is not of that which can be measured on the scale of the everyday. They are concurrently religion, ritual, belief, phantasmagoria, and the primary affirmation of a human coherence, the coagulating strength of language against the anguish of death and the certainty of nothingness. Myths express life, despite the promise of destruction, of the weight of the inevitable. They are without any doubt the most durable monuments of men, in America as in the ancient world. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

You shall not pile, with servile toil, Your monuments upon my breast, Nor yet within the common soil Lay down the wreck of power to rest, Where man can boast that he has trod On him that was "the scourge of God." — Edward Everett Hale

We usually break the story first. For instance, on The Monuments Men, and this one is more complicated because there's a lot of history, so before we started, we sat down with Robert Edsel, the author of the book, for about a week, and basically, he just gave us a lecture and went through everything. And then, I had a researcher, somebody who we had actually used on Argo. — Grant Heslov

I am telling you that the child will not out live the buildings. Do you understand that wheras women may touch the immortal by giving birth, men
great men
must build monuments and seek fame? — Karen Essex

Gold once out of the earth is no more due unto it; what was unreasonably committed to the ground, is reasonably resumed from it; let monuments and rich fabricks, not riches, adorn men's ashes. — Thomas Browne

What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared. — William James

The Second World War created the need for a new generation of female heroes. Where could these women look for role models? The women of the previous war had by this time been largely forgotten. Although efforts had been made during the 1920s to memorialize the war's heroes, both men and women, with monuments, books, and films, most Europeans, impatient to forget the war, also forgot its heroes.

But now the memory of their courage was needed and eagerly recalled... — Kathryn J. Atwood

The smallest pebble in the well of truth has its peculiar meaning, and will stand when man's best monuments have passed away. — Nathaniel Parker Willis

Honorable men refuse to wallow in the small and the bitter. Honorable men refuse to hate life because something once went wrong. Honorable men don't build monuments to their disappointments, nor do they let others brand them and curse them to their destruction. Honorable — Stephen Mansfield

Many legends were made, stories written, monuments built - all witnessing the efforts of men to secure the successful voyage of their souls into the world of eternal dreams. — Stevan V. Nikolic

But leaders need to be mostly dead. People want solid monuments to cling to, not confused men like themselves. — Alasdair Gray

It is probable that a greater number of monuments of the skill and industry of man will, in the course of the ages, be collected together in the bed of the ocean than will exist at any other time on the surface of the continents. — Charles Lyell

When we see the many grave-stones which have fallen in, which have been defaced by the footsteps of the congregation, which lie buried under the ruins of the churches, that have themselves crumbled together over them; we may fancy the life after death to be as a second life, into which man enters in the figure, or the picture or the inscription, and lives longer there than when he was really alive. But this figure also, this second existence, dies out too, sooner or later. Time will not allow himself to be cheated of his rights with the monuments of men or with themselves. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A thousand years from now" Leonidas declared, "two thousand, three thousand years hence, men a hundred generations yet unborn may, for their private purposes, make journey to our country. They will come, scholars perhaps or travelers from beyond the sea, prompted by curiosity regarding the past or appetite for knowledge of the ancients. They will peer out across our plain and probe among the stone and rubble of our nation. What will they learn about us? Their shovels will unearth neither brilliant palaces nor temples. Their picks will prize forth no everlasting architecture or art. What will remain of the Spartans? Not monuments of marble or bronze, but this- what we do here today." Out beyond the narrows, the enemy trumpets sounded. — Steven Pressfield

Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard. — Henry David Thoreau

Those whom nature destined to make her disciples have no need of teachers. Bacon, Descartes, Newton - these tutors of the human race had no need of tutors themselves, and what guides could have led them to those places where their vast genius carried them? Ordinary teachers could only have limited their understanding by confining it to their own narrow capabilities. With the first obstacles, they learned to exert themselves and made the effort to traverse the immense space they moved through. If it is necessary to permit some men to devote themselves to the study of the sciences and the arts, that should be only for those who feel in themselves the power to walk alone in those men's footsteps and to move beyond them. It is the task of this small number of people to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Moreover, the sciences are monuments devoted to the public good; each citizen owes to them a tribute proportional to his talents. While the great men, carried to the summit of the edifice, draw and put up the higher floors, the ordinary artists scattered in the lower floors, or hidden in the obscurity of the foundations, must only seek to improve what cleverer hands have created. — Charles-Augustin De Coulomb

There is great incongruity in this idea of monuments, since those to whom they are usually dedicated need no such recognition to embalm their memory; and any man who does, is not worthy of one. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Fellows are just naturally interested in a good piece of work and have no unnatural restrictions in looking it over. Perhaps, and may the sahibs of the Fogg forgive me for thinking it, this simple, curious outlook of healthy men is more important than some of the monuments themselves. — Robert M. Edsel

When occasions present themselves in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests to withstand the temporary delusion in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. Instances might be cited in which a conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes, and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the peril of their displeasure. — Alexander Hamilton

Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money. — John Prebble

Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys' clubs, girls' clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses - 120 war-horses - musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. "The whole of society," concludes the Japanese study, "was laid waste to its very foundations."2698 Lifton's history professor saw not even foundations left. "Such a weapon," he told the American psychiatrist, "has the power to make everything into nothing. — Richard Rhodes

Yeah! I went to the set of Monuments Men. — Don Cheadle

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.
And even the books that do not last long, penetrate their own times at least, sailing farther than Ulysses even dreamed of, like ships on the seas. It is the author's part to call into being their cargoes and passengers,
living thoughts and rich bales of study and jeweled ideas. As for the publishers, it is they who build the fleet, plan the voyage, and sail on, facing wreck, till they find every possible harbor that will value their burden. — Clarence C. Day

Forty-seven years old, tired, but none the worse for wear. In a little more than thirteen months, he had discovered, analyzed, and packed tens of thousands of pieces of artwork, including eighty truckloads from Altaussee alone. He had organized the MFAA field officers at Normandy, pushed SHAEF to expand and support the monuments effort, mentored the other Monuments Men across France and Germany, interrogated many of the important Nazi art officials, and inspected most of the Nazi repositories south of Berlin and east of the Rhine. It would be no exaggeration to guess he put 50,000 miles on his old captured VW and visited nearly every area of action in U.S. Twelfth Army Group territory. And during his entire tour of duty on the continent, he had taken exactly one and a half days off. — Robert M. Edsel

The gods, he knows now, will not help mankind. If they even exist - which he is no longer certain of - it is clear they do not care what happens. Perhaps they will even applaud when the last monuments of the Second Age of Kings crumble to dust, and the men who once worshiped them are reduced to the level of beasts. Perhaps that is what they intended all along. — C.S. Friedman

With monuments as with men, position means everything. — Honore De Balzac

A nation not of men but of laws, intoned John Adams as he, among other lawyers, launched what has easily become the most demented society ever consciously devised by intelligent men. We are now enslaves by laws. We are governed by lawyers. We create little but litigate much. Our monuments are the ever-expanding prisons, where millions languish for having committed victimless crimes or for simply not playing the game of plausible deniability (aka lying) with a sufficiently good legal team. What began as a sort of Restoration comedy, The Impeachment of a President, on a frivolous, irrelevant matter, is suddenly turning very black indeed, and all our political arrangements are at risk as superstitious Christian fundamentalists and their corporate manipulators seem intent on overthrowing two presidential elections in a Senate trial. This is no longer comedy. This is usurpation. — Gore Vidal

The search for truth is, as it always has been, the noblest expression of the human spirit. Man's insatiable desire for knowledge about himself, about his environment and the forces by which he is surrounded, gives life its meaning and purpose, and clothes it with final dignity ... And yet we know, deep in our hearts, that knowledge is not enough ... Unless we can anchor our knowledge to moral purposes, the ultimate result will be dust and ashes- dust and ashes that will bury the hopes and monuments of men beyond recovery. — Raymond B. Fosdick

O Time the fatal wrack of mortal things,
That draws oblivion's curtains over kings;
Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,
Their names without a record are forgot,
Their parts, their ports, their pomps all laid in th' dust
Nor wit nor gold, nor buildings scape time's rust;
But he whose name is graved in the white stone
Shall last and shine when all of these are gone. — Anne Bradstreet

The thought came back to him, as it often did: To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won ... it was unheard of, but that was exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do. — Robert M. Edsel

Pygmies are pygmies still, though percht on Alps; And pyramids are pyramids in vales. Each man makes his own stature, builds himself. Virtue alone outbuilds the Pyramids; Her monuments shall last when Egypt's fall. — Edward Young