The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.

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

Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs - it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers.

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

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

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

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.