A monument's dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events commemorated.
Gutzon Borglum
Art does not exist for itself; it is but an avenue through and by which humanity expresses itself.
Mount Rushmore is eternal. It will stand until the end of time.
Motherhood is heroism. It is God-given, and yet men treat women as though of similar common clay, when in fact they are but lower than the angels.
American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life.
Art in America should be American, drawn from American sources, memorializing American achievement.
Lincoln has been my first love, and as always with first loves, it fixed a standard. So I scaled sunlit heights with Lincoln and produced the colossal marble head in the rotunda of the capitol of the United States.
The aim of art is to understand and establish order, which is another form of beauty.
Beauty is like a soul that hovers over the surface of form. Its presence is unmistakable in art or in life.
You have here In New York one of the greatest and most picturesque and artistic structures in the world. I mean the Brooklyn Bridge.
I have a very unsatisfactory and incomplete knowledge of Brooklyn and cannot discuss specifically either what you can do here or what possibilities the city shows in an artistic way. I am not a foreigner but coming here as I do after a long stay abroad, I think things here strike me much as they strike a foreigner.
There is art in everything - industry, education, play, all are forms of art.
There is none of that feeling about art that you meet everywhere in Europe. There you will hear people say, 'Oh, you must see such-and-such a statue at 4 o'clock in the afternoon; then the light is beautiful,' or, 'See this monument in the early morning; the light is best for it then.' Do you ever hear anything like that from an American?
There is something in sheer volume that awes and terrifies, lifts us out of ourselves.
Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor. Civilizations are ghouls.
A city of homes should not be built as a business center.
An artist will starve unless he is near big centers of population. We should create many of these cultural centers right in our own slums.
We have been concentrating on the banks, business and our bellies. We have neglected the spiritual and cultural. It was because Rome and Athens neglected these things that they fell.
Renaissance always comes out of depression.
Man's soul is strengthened by suffering.
I believe and find in my study of art that the real artist is nine-tenths of the time a craftsman, and it is only in that small one-tenth of the time that he rises to the elevated position of a prophet and a master.
I was born in the Golden West, reared in the arms of the Church, deluged with saints to draw from, and suckled on Italian art: my slates were covered from end to end with portraits of Savonarola, Fra Angelico, and Wild Bill and Sitting Bull; I knew all equally well and admired them about alike.
Nothing in life is without cause and effect. Nothing is merely a shell. Everything has some motive.
Democracy has betrayed the race, because education has not served man as was expected.
I am ready to rot in jail that art may live.
Genius knocks on the door and gets no answer but its own echo.
That is how America gets her art: Contracting firms get the contract and the honor. Starving artists do the work. The government pays for sculpturing thousands of dollars, of which the sculptor gets a hundred or so.
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.
Art is not what most people think it to be. It is not an occupation of one-railed people.
Women have always been the world's burden bearers. Ever since history began the great burden of the world's faith, its belief in immortality has been carried in the arms of its women.
For many years I had been aware that women were not only most important creations in the universe, but the nearest approach that man could reach to the divine.
No man can ever repay the brooding mother love to which he his life.
America has no monuments to ideas; her monuments are erected to individuals.
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.
I have labored to make the record of the great men of my time.
A piece of sculpture has to be more than a block of wood.
Washington and Lincoln mean as much to us as any two men could mean to a civilization, a people, and age, but I told Mr. Coolidge when he dedicated this monument that this rock is being carved with a monument that will outlive our government.
Ten thousand years from now our civilization will have passed without leaving a trace. A new race of people will inhabit the earth. They will come to Mount Rushmore and read the record we have made.
I am ready to rot in jail for the rest of my life rather than admit that my small-minded enemies are right.
Stone Mountain Memorial is the greatest project of its sort ever conceived. It should be finished, because it represent an idea as deep, as basic as the rocks on which our wonderful continent rests.
Gutzon Borglum, the individual, is nothing. Art, expression, freedom are everything. On this I stand or fall.
Forget about getting a bank balance and don't be satisfied with things being good enough. Accept only that which is good or the best.
Nebraska people have the heart and power to create real beauty and art if they will only wake up and do it.
Out of the west came Lincoln, and all that he had he gave to the preservation of the Union that had been bought so dearly and was falling to pieces.
If you are an artist, you may live with Lincoln. You sit with him, your coat is spread to keep the snow from the grave of Ann Rutledge; you will walk with Washington through the snow and suffer with him as you note the bloodstained footsteps at Valley Forge.
