Stonehenge

"I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, "Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!" Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that."

"When any work seems to have required immense force and labor to effect it, the idea is grand. Stonehenge, neither for disposition nor ornament, has anything admirable; but those huge rude masses of stone, set on end, and piled each on other, turn the mind on the immense force necessary for such a work. Nay, the rudeness of the work increases this cause of grandeur, as it excludes the idea of art and contrivance; for dexterity produces another sort of effect, which is different enough from this."

"Much of what has been written about Stonehenge is derivative, second-rate or plain wrong."

"Hello, Stonehenge! Who takes the Pandorica, takes the universe!"

"Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves-or desires."

"I don't like the place at all. It's all wrong. An imposition on the Landscape. I reckon that Stonehenge was build by the contemporary equivalent of Microsoft, whereas Avebury was definitely an Apple circle."

"Stonehenge, where the demons dwell Where the banshees live and they do live well Stonehenge, where a man's a man And the children dance to the pipes of Pan."

"Our Soveraign here above the rest might stand; And here be chose again to rule the Land. These Ruines sheltered once His Sacred Head, Then when from Wor'ster's fatal Field He fled; Watch'd by the Genius of this Royal place, And mighty Visions of the Danish Race, HisRefuge then was for a Temple shown: But, He restor'd, 'tis now become a Throne."

"Another very unlikely spot is made use of by as a place to breed in, and that is Stonehenge. These birds deposit their nests in the interstices between the upright and the impost stones of that amazing work of antiquity; which circumstance alone speaks the prodigious height of the upright stones, that they should be tall enough to secure those nests from the annoyance of shepherd boys, who are always idling round that place."