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Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

Kenneth Clark

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Kenneth Clark
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A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
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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.
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You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.
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The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
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Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
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Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs - it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers.
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In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.
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All color is no color.
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Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
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Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.
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We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
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To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.
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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.
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I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.
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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.
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Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.
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Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to speak of it as a drama. It is the most literary of all great pictures, one of the few of which the effect may largely be conveyed - can even be enhanced - by description.
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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.
Kenneth Clark