Museums

"Of all the foundations of establishments for pious or charitable uses, which ever signalized the spirit of the age, or the comprehensive beneficence of the founder, none can be named more deserving of the approbation of mankind than this. Should it be faithfully carried into effect, with an earnestness and sagacity of application, and a steady perseverance of pursuit, proportioned to the means furnished by the will of the founder, and to the greatness and simplicity of his design as by himself declared, “the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men,” it is no extravagance of anticipation to declare, that his name will be hereafter enrolled among the eminent benefactors of mankind…. Whoever increases his knowledge, multiplies the uses to which he is enabled to turn the gift of his Creator."

"There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institute, right next to The Spirit of St. Louis."

"I worked at the Smithsonian for a number of years. I had a very low-level job. I didn't have much responsibility, but I did have a Smithsonian ID badge that gave me access to all of the museums on the mall, and also the National Gallery of Art. In those days, you could go anywhere, which you can't do now. You could get in behind the scenes and wander along these tunnels. There is a scene in "Prince of Flowers" where the characters are in the Paleontology Department of the Museum of Natural History where they really do have this Raiders of the Lost Ark-type vast space filled with all of these unopened cartons. … I was really entranced with the idea of living in a museum. In Winterlong there are two parallel storylines and the one for Raphael takes place among this guild or tribe of curators who live in the ruins of the Smithsonian Institution."

"Traditionally, art has been for the select few. We have been brainwashed to believe that Michaelangelo had to pat you on the head at birth. Well, we show people that anybody can paint a picture that they're proud of. It may never hang in the Smithsonian, but it will certainly be something that they'll hang in their home and be proud of. And that's what it's all about."

"The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of "WOKE." The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made. This Country cannot be WOKE because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the “HOTTEST” Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums."

"We are permitted to confront real, not simulated, artifacts of human suffering, and are, at a gut level, able to appreciate the epic achievements of medicine."

"Currently, only 11 acts have been inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. They are: Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, The Everly Brothers, Hank Williams, Brenda Lee, Sam Phillips, Floyd Cramer, Chet Atkins, Bill Monroe, Jimmy Rogers, and Bob Wills. Only a few of them are pure country acts, while Cash is the only country artist to ever be voted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and not put in under a specialty award."

"Built and named for the , Pavlovsk began as a convenient way of getting the then Grand Duke out of his mother's sight. was anything but fond of her only legitimate son, and getting him out from underfoot was well worth the price of a palace, so, in 1777, she gave him a large estate 17 miles south of and three miles from the royal resort of , and four years later building on the house was begun. As it turned out, however, the person who supervised every detail of the construction and the decoration was Paul's wife, the Grand Duchess, and later Empress, . This civilized and artistically inclined German-Alsatian princess knew just what she was doing. The house was finished in 1796 and modified somewhat after a fire in 1803; as it stood at the time of her death in 1828, it was probably the finest (and certainly the most complete) palace in Europe."

"Built during the era of the and the , the palace contains many motifs from antiquity, beginning with the Egyptian Vestibule (Yegipetskiy vestibyul) on the first floor, which is lined with pharaonic statues and zodiac medallions. From here, visitors are ushered upstairs to the second floor State Rooms via the main staircase, designed by with martial motifs to pander to Paul's pretensions. The northern parade of rooms reflect his martial obsessions, the southern ones the more domesticated tastes of Maria Fyodorovna. The striking thing about the rooms, though, is their relatively human scale — you could just about imagine living there — unlike those of the Great Palaces of and . At the top of the stairs, to the right, the domed Italian Hall (Italyanskiy zal) rises into the palace's central . Its decor, intended by to evoke a , is uniformly , with rich helpings of trompe l'oeil and s and s shaped like s."