"I think Stone Mountain is amusing, but then again I find most representations of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson outside of Virginia, and, in Jackson's case, West Virginia, to be amusing. Aside from a short period in 1861-62, when Lee was placed in charge of the coastal defense of South Carolina and Georgia, neither general stepped foot in Georgia during the war. Lee cut off furloughs to Georgia's soldiers later in the war because he was convinced that once home they’d never come back. He resisted the dispatch of James Longstreet's two divisions westward to defend northern Georgia, and he had no answer when Sherman operated in the state. It would be better to see Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood on the mountain, although it probably would have been difficult to get those two men to ride together. Maybe Braxton Bragg would have been a better pick, but no one calls him the hero of Chickamauga. Yet Bragg, Johnston, and Hood all attempted to defend Georgia, and they are ignored on Stone Mountain. So is Joe Wheeler, whose cavalry feasted off Georgians in 1864. So is John B. Gordon, wartime hero and postwar Klansman. Given Stone Mountain's history, Klansman Gordon would have been a good choice. It's also amusing to see Jefferson Davis represented. Yes, Davis came to Georgia, once to try to settle disputes within the high command of the Army of Tennessee, not a rousing success, and once to rally white Georgians to the cause once more after the fall of Atlanta. But any serious student of the war knows that Davis spent much of his presidency arguing with Georgia governor Joseph Brown about Georgia's contribution to the Confederate war effort, and that the vice president of the Confederacy, Georgia's own Alexander Hamilton Stephens, was not a big supporter of his superior. Yet we don't see Brown or Stephens on Stone Mountain, either."

"Europe stretches to the Alleghenies, America lies beyond."

"The migration of the eighteenth century took two directions: the advance westward towards the Ohio, with its settlement of Kentucky and Tennessee, and the occupation of the north-west forest regions, the fur-traders’ domain, beyond Lake Erie. The colonisation of New England and the eastern coastline of America had been mainly the work of powerful companies, aided by the English Crown or by feudal proprietors with chartered rights. But here in the new lands of the West any man with an axe and a rifle could carve for himself a rude frontier home. By 1790 there were thirty-five thousand settlers in the Tennessee country, and double that number in Kentucky. By 1800 there were a million Americans west of the mountain ranges of the Alleghenies. From these new lands a strong, self-reliant Western breed took its place in American life. Modem American democracy was bom and cradled in the valley of the Mississippi. The foresight of the first independent Congress of the United States had proclaimed for all time the principle that when new territories gained a certain population they should be admitted to statehood upon an equality with the existing partners of the Union. It is a proof of the quality and power of the Westerners that eleven of the eighteen Presidents of the United States between 1828 and 1901 were either bom or passed the greater part of their lives in the valley of the Mississippi."

"Is this not a bit of northern Maine?"

"In the form of North Mountain, no matter where seen from, whether from the beginning of the Bald Eagle ridge at Muncy, pale blue in the distant ether, or in the middle distance rising in all the majesty of its many colors from the top of Tommy Taylor's hill, or face to face with its grim wall at Jamison City, it is impressive not only for its mammoth proportions, but for its individuality. No other mountain in the world is in any way like it. It is vast, but there is beauty in its vastness; LeConte's theory of the divine architecture of mountains is illustrated by it, it is the type of majesty in Nature, Nature's cathedral. In fact, its outline against the sky strikingly suggests the form of Natre Dame, [sic] flying buttresses and all."

"There could be no better place to celebrate America’s independence than beneath this magnificent, incredible, majestic mountain and monument to the greatest Americans who have ever lived. Today, we pay tribute to the exceptional lives and extraordinary legacies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. I am here as your President to proclaim before the country and before the world: This monument will never be desecrated. These heroes will never be defaced, their legacy will never, ever be destroyed, their achievements will never be forgotten, and Mount Rushmore will stand forever as an eternal tribute to our forefathers and to our freedom."

"What does this Mount Rushmore mean to us Indians? It means that these big white faces are telling us, "First we gave you Indians a treaty that you could keep these Black Hills forever, as long as the sun would shine, in exchange for all of the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana. Then we found the gold and took this last piece of land, because we were stronger. ... And because we like the tourist dollars, too, we have made your sacred Black Hills into one vast Disneyland. And after we did all this we carved up this mountain, the dwelling place of your spirits, and put our four gleaming white faces here. We are the conquerors.""

"In 1970, AIM, United Native Americans, and Lakota activists from South Dakota occupied Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills to bring attention to the 1868 Treaty and the fact that the land upon which the monument had been built was stolen. Activists pointed out that the monument itself was a form of vandalism-not "a shrine of democracy" but "a shrine of hypocrisy." Each president-Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt-had participated in Indigenous genocide and land theft. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy called Washington "Town Destroyer" for his role in the extirpation of their villages. Jefferson had advanced Indigenous removal policies and begun the expansion of the US empire west of the Mississippi. Lincoln had ordered the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota patriots after the 1862 US-Dakota War and oversaw the 1864 Long Walk for Navajos in the Southwest. Roosevelt had "nationalized" millions of acres of Indigenous lands for national parks. While symbolic, there was a growing militancy to the tactics of takeover and occupation. Across the United States, BIA headquarters became the targets for protest. Among the protestors' many concerns was the failure to uphold treaties. Critics in the federal government viewed treaty claims as mere rhetoric."

"Every face on Mt. Rushmore was a third party candidate at some point or another."

"This is our country at its very best. What an incredible achievement. Just the accomplishment and the beauty, it really does make one very proud to be an American."

"Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!"

"Gentlemen, the uh, camper and the car sitting over to the south of me is covered. It's gonna get me, too. I can't get out of here ...,"

"If the mountain goes, I'm going with it."