Monuments Men Quotes

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

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

If you destroy an entire generation of people's culture, it's as if they never existed. ~ Lt. Frank Stokes

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

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

No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past."
- British Major Ronald Balfour of the Monuments Men ~ Robert M. Edsel

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

We do not want to destroy unnecessarily what men spent so much time and care and skill in making... for these examples of craftsmanship tell us so much about our 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 civilization 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. ~ Ronald Balfour British Monuments Man

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

Men hear loud voices, but they listen to strong words. ~ Toba Beta

Two men, one fairly dragging the other along, suddenly entered the clearing and, their eyes trained behind them, ran headlong into the owl's creation and knocked it, every maple branch and every twig of dogwood, to the ground in a splintering crash. The owl fell backward, devastated. ~ Colin Meloy

The colonization of the Southern economy by capitalists from the North gave lynching its most vigorous impulse. If Black people, by means of terror and violence, could remain the most brutally exploited group within the swelling ranks of the working class, the capitalists could enjoy a double advantage. Extra profits would result from the superexploitation of Black labor, and white workers' hostilities toward their employers would be defused. White workers who assented to lynching necessarily assumed a posture of racial solidarity with the white men who were really their oppressors. This was a critical moment in the popularization of racist ideology. ~ Angela Y. Davis

I do not believe in loving enemies; I have pretty hard work to love my friends. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Wine give strenght to weary men. and
And wine can of their wits the wise beguile.
Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile. and
Let those who drink not, but austerely dine,
Dry up in law; the muses smell of wine. and
No poem was ever written by a drinker of water. and
Bacchus opens the gate of the heart. and
Might to inspire new hopes and powerful
To drown the bitterness of cares. ~ Homer

Through all history, from the beginning, a noble army of martyrs have fought fiercely and fallen bravely for that unseen mistress, their country. So, through all history, to the end, as long as men believe in God that army must still march and fall, recruited only from the flower of mankind, cheered only by their own hope of humanity, strong only in the confidence of their cause. ~ George William Curtis

Mankind never loses any good thing, physical, intellectual, or moral, till it finds a better, and then the loss is a gain. No steps backward is the rule of human history. What is gained by one man is invested in all men, and is a permanent investment for all time. ~ Theodore Parker

Get on yo job little man this ain't Saturday ~ J. Cole

He whom we call a gentleman is no longer the man of Nature. ~ Denis Diderot

He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself. ~ C.S. Lewis

The present relationship existing between husband and wife, where one claims a command over the actions of the other, is nothing more than a remnant of the old leaven of slavery. It is necessarily destructive of refined love; for how can a man continue to regard as his type of the ideal a being whom he has, be denying an equality of privilege with himself, degraded to something below himself? ~ Herbert Spencer

The monster tested her, pulling at her soul and rending her spirit. She clung to life, and in the clinging she might have become a monster too, except she chose the path her story would take. She chose white stone walls and a golden crown. She chose to debate words of law, and to never grind her own grain. She chose to fight men every day, and then fight their sons, who thought they knew better than their fathers.<...> If you listen long enough to the whispers, you will hear the truth. Until then, I will tell you this: the world is made safe by a woman. ~ E.K. Johnston

For a man who has compared himself to Theodore Roosevelt and the nation's challenges to those of the Gilded Age, Obama put forward a tepid agenda. ~ Ron Fournier

On a reservation, Indian men who abandon their children are treated worse than white fathers who do the same thing. It's because white men have been doing that forever and Indian men have just learned how. That's how assimilation can work. ~ Sherman Alexie

Watch out for men who want to turn everything into a story that's all about them. There will always be a few of them, and once one of them starts, another one of them will want to fight with him. ~ Chris Beckett

Commonly we say a judgment falls upon a man for something in him we cannot abide. ~ John Selden

For a man, no more beautiful wish has ever found yet than wishing him a life full of kindness! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I had to show that the Bible dealt with an encounter between God and Man. I thought only of the apartness of God. What I had to learn after that was the togetherness of Man and God a union of two totally different kinds of beings. ~ Karl Barth

Prayer is the chief thing that man may present unto God. ~ Georg Hermes

It was Silver's voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world. I lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiostiy, for, in those dozen words, I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended on me alone. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

Men become utilitarian out of fear of the alternative the chaos of tangled or tepid desires, of rootlessness and boredom. ~ John Carroll

He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Borges is the fabulist. He is no reader who has not heard, in his inward ear, the call of the hundreds of thousands, of the millions of volumes which stand in the stacks of the British Library asking to be read. For there is in each book a gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence, which can be won only when the book is opened again (but in contrast to man, the book can wait centuries for the hazard of resurrection.) ~ George Steiner

A great man will find a great subject, or which is the same thing, make any subject great. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Many are poets, but without the name;
For what is Poesy but to create
From overfeeling Good or Ill; and aim
At an external life beyond our fate,
And be the new Prometheus of new men,
Bestowing fire from Heaven, and then, too late,
Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain ~ George Gordon Byron

Well, it would have to be "The Man Who Was Thursday." It's a damn good read that I believe should be read by everyone in politics. ~ Terry Pratchett

Men are easily threatened. And whenever a man is threatened, when he becomes uncomfortable in places within himself that he does not understand, he naturally retreats into an arena of comfort or competence, or he dominates someone or something in order to feel powerful. Men refuse to feel the paralyzing and humbling horror of uncertainty, a horror that could drive them to trust, a horror that could release in them the power to deeply give themselves in relationship. As a result, most men feel close to no one, especially not to God, and no one feels close to them. Something good in men is stopped and needs to get moving. When good movement stops, bad movement (retreat or domination) reliably develops. ~ Larry Crabb

The night club had a curious and diverse appeal. To some it was a sex-exciter. To others, frequenting a night club and throwing away money was a form of exhibitionism ... wealthy men from out of town visited the clubs for appalling orgies of spending and drinking, and most of them seemed to think it was worth the cost. ~ Stanley Walker

Flowers knew how to preach divinity before men knew how to dissect and botanize them. ~ Henry Norman Hudson

Men who hold a theory of the Church which excludes from communion those whom they admit to have the Spirit of Christ simply proclaim that their theory is in flat contradiction to the spiritual fact. ~ Roland Allen

The government's only proper job is to protect individual rights against violence by force or fraud ... to protect men from foreign invaders ... to settle disputes among men according to objective laws ... The greatness of the Founding Fathers was how well they understood this issue and how close some of them came to understanding it perfectly. ~ Ayn Rand

I have always said that if I were a rich man, I would employ a professional praiser. ~ Osbert Sitwell

Evil is a point of view. We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms. ~ Anne Rice

In this country kings or dukes don't amount to nothing. The greatest man around then was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he was the President; so I started calling Lester the President. It got shortened to Pres. ~ Billie Holiday

I feel like men don't hold the door open as much. ~ Karen Gillan

Dear Uncle Bernard -
Your niece Frances - a four-eyed, French-plaited platypus awaiting the evaporation of h baby fat - thanks you very much for the romantic advice. But I've never been one to spend time thinking about why men and women take to each other, or why they don't. I think it can turn a lady neurotic, a term I despise but also am loath to have turned in my direction. ~ Carlene Bauer

Just as it is the duty of all men to obey just laws, so it is the duty of all men to disobey unjust laws. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

When you've been lied to your whole life by people, especially men, you learn how to read when people are telling the truth and when they're not. ~ Kelly Elliott

There is not the slightest danger of women becoming too intellectual or knowing too much. Neither is there any danger of men knowing too much. At least, I know of no men who are in immediate peril from that source. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Let me give you my vision: A man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master. These are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free country, and on that freedom all of our other freedoms depend. ~ Margaret Thatcher

Mum calls you happy." Emily giggled.
"Huh? I don't know your Mom…" "She says men like you are happy!"
Garry stared at her, uncomprehending. He'd rarely felt less happy in his life.
"She means gay," Max said, and now there was a grin on his face. ~ Clare London

I am a traditional man. I'm a product of a traditional man. He sacrificed everything for his family. ~ Andy Garcia

I assure you, Constable Morgan, I am quite sane, as I understand the word, perhaps the sanest person in this room, for I suffer from no illusions. I have freed myself, you see, from the pretense that burdens most men. Much like our prey, I do not impose order where there is none; I do not pretend there is any more than what there is, or that you and I are anything more than what we are. That is the essence of their beauty, Morgan, the aboriginal purity of their being, and why I admire them. ~ Rick Yancey

the mind itself suggests to itself many perverted, vicious forms of pleasure? - in the first place arrogance, excessive self-esteem, swaggering precedence over other men, a shortsighted, nay, a blind devotion to his own interests, dissolute luxury, excessive delight springing from the most trifling and childish causes, and also talkativeness, pride that takes a pleasure in insulting others, sloth, and the decay of a dull mind which goes to sleep over itself. ~ Seneca.