Kenneth Clark Quotes
A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
A lot of people you think you know you don't know until you find out you don't know then it may be too late to know.
Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.
I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.
Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and blobs of colour.
The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.
Over and above the political, economic, sociological, and international implications of racial prejudices, their major significance is that they place unnecessary burdens upon human beings.
The Cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of Mammon.
Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.
Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless agency, have a strange idea of doing service to his reputation.
Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition; adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty.
To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.
It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well.
Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it.
Energy is eternal delight; and from the earliest times human beings have tried to imprison it in some durable hieroglyphic. It is perhaps the first of all the subjects of art.
The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.
I just don't think the moon is going to be an adequate substitute for the fact that we haven't addressed ourselves to clearing up the slums.
I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.
A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.
I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.
Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.
Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable... they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight!
I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.
