Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.

- Robert Smithson

An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.

- Robert Smithson

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.

- Robert Smithson

Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head.

- Robert Smithson

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us.

- Robert Smithson

Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

- Robert Smithson

Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.

- Robert Smithson

History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.

- Robert Smithson

Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.

- Robert Smithson

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

- Robert Smithson

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

- Robert Smithson

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

- Robert Smithson

Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control.

- Robert Smithson

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.

- Robert Smithson

Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.

- Robert Smithson

The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.

- Robert Smithson

A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence.

- Robert Smithson

Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.

- Robert Smithson

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

- Robert Smithson

From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.

- Robert Smithson