Artist Quotes by Gutzon Borglum

Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor. Civilizations are ghouls.

— Gutzon Borglum

Ten thousand years from now our civilization will have passed without leaving a trace. A new race of people will inhabit the earth. They…

— Gutzon Borglum

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…

— Gutzon Borglum

Beauty is like a soul that hovers over the surface of form. Its presence is unmistakable in art or in life.

— Gutzon Borglum

Out of the west came Lincoln, and all that he had he gave to the preservation of the Union that had been bought so…

— Gutzon Borglum

I am ready to rot in jail for the rest of my life rather than admit that my small-minded enemies are right.

— Gutzon Borglum

Art in America should be American, drawn from American sources, memorializing American achievement.

— Gutzon Borglum

I am ready to rot in jail that art may live.

— Gutzon Borglum

Nothing in life is without cause and effect. Nothing is merely a shell. Everything has some motive.

— Gutzon Borglum

You may go from the Battery to Harlem, and in our monuments and statues of public men you will see the slavish adherence to…

— Gutzon Borglum

A monument's dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events commemorated.

— Gutzon Borglum

The purpose of the memorial is to communicate the founding, expansion, preservation, and unification of the United States with colossal statues of Washington, Jefferson,…

— Gutzon Borglum

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…

— Gutzon Borglum

I have labored to make the record of the great men of my time.

— Gutzon Borglum

You have here In New York one of the greatest and most picturesque and artistic structures in the world. I mean the Brooklyn Bridge.

— Gutzon Borglum