Statue of Liberty

"We arent here today to bow before the representation of a fierce warlike god, filled with wrath and vengeance, but we joyously contemplate instead our own deity keeping watch and ward before the open gates of America and greater than all that have been celebrated in ancient song. Instead of grasping in her hand thunderbolts of terror and of death, she holds aloft the light which illumines the way to mans enfranchisement. We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home, nor shall her chosen altar be neglected. Willing votaries will constantly keep alive its fires and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister Republic thence, and joined with answering rays a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and mans oppression, until Liberty enlightens the world."

"You know that our Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, and its sculptor, Auguste Bartholdi, was a son of France. I dont know if youve ever studied the face of the statue, but immigrants entering New York Harbor used to strain to see it, as if it would tell them something about their new world. Its a strong, kind face. It is the face of Bartholdis mother, a woman of Alsace. And so, among the many things we Americans thank you for, we thank you for her. The Statue of Liberty—made in Europe, erected in America—helps remind us not only of past ties but present realities. It is to those realities we must look in order to dispel whatever doubts may exist about the course of history and the place of free men and women within it. We live in a complex, dangerous, divided world; yet a world which can provide all of the good things we require—spiritual and material—if we but have the confidence and courage to face historys challenge."

"The massive figure of a bronze woman is covered from head to foot with green oxide. The cold face looks blindly through the fog into the ocean wasteland, as though the bronze were waiting for the sun to come and bring its dead eyes to life."

"Taking the form of a veiled peasant woman the statue was to stand 86 feet high, and its pedestal was to rise to a height of 48 feet."

"Bartholdi produced a series of drawings in which the proposed statue began as a gigantic female fellah, or Arab peasant, and gradually evolved into a colossal goddess that resembled the ones he had contemplated in the early and mid 1860s."

"You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of hell: "All hope abandon ye who enter here"."