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.

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

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.

Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.

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

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it.

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.