I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.

In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Society therefore is as ancient as the world.

Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

In history people dressed much better than we do today.

Every President I think I’ve ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn’t quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.

History should be written as philosophy.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

If you look at the history of Notre Dame, if you hire a coach who’s been successful at another college program, they’re going to be ultra successful at Notre Dame because the talent will always be there.

Nixon is one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

The kings of Spain brought us the conquistadores and masters, whose footprints remained in the circular land grants assigned to those searching for gold in the sands of rivers, an abusive and shameful form of exploitation, traces of which can be noted from the air in many places around the country.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.

In art the best is good enough.

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.

The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

I don’t think we handled the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad as well as we might have. But that’s now history.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We, of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.