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I was writing a chapter of Beautiful Evidence on the subject of the sculptural pedestal, which led to my thinking about what's up on the pedestal - the great leader.

As I passed along the side walls of Westminster Abbey, I hardly saw any thing but marble monuments of great admirals, but which were all too much loaded with finery and ornaments, to make on me at least, the intended impression.

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.

I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.

I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed... here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars.

I don't mind being a symbol but I don't want to become a monument. There are monuments all over the Parliament Buildings and I've seen what the pigeons do to them.

Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

We say to the British government: you have kept those sculptures for almost two centuries. You have cared for them as well as you could, for which we thank you. But now in the name of fairness and morality, please give them back.