»The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.«

»Perhaps because we see our own mortality in the collapse of the bridge. We expect people to die; we count on our own lives to end. The destruction of a monument to civilisation is something else. The bridge in all its beauty and grace was built to outlive us; it was an attempt to grasp eternity. It transcends our individual destiny. A dead woman is one of us – but the bridge is all of us forever.«

»Die Welt ist nicht mehr ein Widerstand, gegen den wir stoßen, sondern sie wird zu einer Erscheinung, die wir uns ansehen.«

»Monuments are mortal. In fact, a monument often becomes so powerfully symbolic that someone acquires a vested potential for destroying it. This potential for destruction or defacement maybe the most meaningful aspect of the monument’s existence.«

»If the writing of history is the privilege of the victor, so is the successful rewriting of it.«