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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.

Kenneth Clark

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Kenneth Clark
Culture
Overrate
Used
Swans
People
Charming
Manners
Wars
Ignorant
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War

More quotes by 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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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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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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Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.
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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 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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Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
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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.
Kenneth Clark
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All color is no color.
Kenneth Clark
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No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
Kenneth Clark
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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.
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We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
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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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Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.
Kenneth Clark
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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.
Kenneth Clark
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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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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.
Kenneth Clark
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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.
Kenneth Clark
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The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
Kenneth Clark
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All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
Kenneth Clark