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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.

Kenneth Clark

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Kenneth Clark
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More quotes by 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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People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.
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The history of art cannot be properly understood without some reference to the history of science. In both we are studying the symbols by which man affirms his mental scheme, and these symbols, be they pictorial or mathematical, a fable or formula, will reflect the same changes.
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The illustrator is essentially a reporter: his subjects come from the outside, lit by a flash. A subject comes to the classical artist from inside, and when he discovers confirmation of it in the outside world he feels that it has been there all the time.
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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.
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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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The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience.
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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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The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.
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We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
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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.
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Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.
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The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and-above all-economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.
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All color is no color.
Kenneth Clark
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Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography the good ones all welcomed it and used it.
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Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty.
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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.
Kenneth Clark
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Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.
Kenneth Clark
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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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Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
Kenneth Clark