GUTZON BORGLUM

A piece of sculpture has to be more than a block of wood.

Mount Rushmore is eternal. It will stand until the end of time.

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

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

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.

Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor. Civilizations are ghouls.

The aim of art is to understand and establish order, which is another form of beauty.

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

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

Nebraska people have the heart and power to create real beauty and art if they will only wake up and do it.

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.

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

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

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.

Gutzon Borglum, the individual, is nothing. Art, expression, freedom are everything. On this I stand or fall.

A city of homes should not be built as a business center.

Art does not exist for itself; it is but an avenue through and by which humanity expresses itself.

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.

Renaissance always comes out of depression.

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.

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.

Genius knocks on the door and gets no answer but its own echo.

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.

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.

There is art in everything - industry, education, play, all are forms of art.