It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well.

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.

Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition; adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty.

Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable... they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight!

A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.

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.

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