Kenneth Clark Quotes

Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.

A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.

We are part of a great whole. All living things are our brothers and sisters.

I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. 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 try to learn from history.

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.

Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.

Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.

Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.

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.

I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.

The recognized achievements of some Negroes, despite rigid racial barriers, indicate that society by its prejudices may be depriving itself of valuable contributions from many others. It is now doubtful whether America can afford the luxury of such a waste of human resources.

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.

Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it.

This became Delacroix 's theme: that the achievements of the spirit all that a great library contained were the result of a state of society so delicately balanced that at the least touch they would be crushed beneath an avalanche of pent-up animal forces.

The nude gains its enduring value from the fact that it reconciles several contrary states. It takes the most sensual and immediately interesting object, the human body, and puts it out of reach of time and desire; it takes the most purely rational concept of which mankind is capable, mathematical order, and makes it a delight to the senses; and it takes the vague fears of the unknown and sweetens them by showing that the gods are like men and may be worshiped for their life-giving beauty rather than their death-dealing powers.

All color is no color.

The great artist takes what he needs.

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.

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling... The desire to grasp and be united with another human is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgement of what is known as 'pure form' is inevitably influenced by it, and one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these instincts cannot be hidden.

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

In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.

Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.

Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility.