Quote:The project's founder, Peter Rosengard, told the London SE1 website that public consultation had not been carried out before the planning application was made because the foundation's advisors had said that very few people lived close to the park.
Quote:A member of the audience came to the lectern to ask for a show of hands. Professor Schama then covered the microphones to prevent the man from being heard.
Quote:If I did not think that the 9/11 Project and Miya Ando's monument, designed above all to act as a focal point for educating the young, was a translation out of atrocity into a different language I would not be here tonight and I would not be interested in supporting the project which I do with all my mind, all my sense of what moral civil society is and a lot of my heart too.
Quote:Historians – some of us at least – are committed to the notion that history's function is education through memory
Quote:It seems to me that if the enormity of 9/11 was directed at a group of private individuals, then the rights of the grieving not to be reminded of the misery and pain and horror of that moment are sovereign; are supreme; should never be contested
Quote:The attack of Mohamed Atta and others was not on a group of individuals. Ultimately it was on the idea of a secular, tolerant, pluralistic society itself
Quote:Do we want … in the name of a quiet life, in the name of the bucolic serenity of your city, to turn our face away from that?
Quote:Or is the integrity of the freedom of civil society in a great cosmopolitan place like this actually at stake?
Quote:What you are taking away is the possibility of the citizens of London being able to reflect on the mortal danger posed by this atrocity. This is what you are withholding from them
Quote:I do find it a little bit hypocritical – that's it's fine to have a programme in schools … but it's somehow not fine to have it as part of our urban fabric
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