Gutzon Borglum

No man can ever repay the brooding mother love to which he his life.

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.

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?

Art is not what most people think it to be. It is not an occupation of one-railed people.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor. Civilizations are ghouls.

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