Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.

The sole justification of teaching, of the school itself, is that the student comes out of it able to do something he could not do before. I say do and not know, because knowledge that doesn't lead to doing something new or doing something better is not knowledge at all.

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.

The nation in arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as on the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions of strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed.

We cannot appreciate the art of any age without first acquiring an equivalent of the experience it depicts.

By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.

To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.