Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless agency, have a strange idea of doing service to his reputation.

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

Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless agency, have a strange idea of doing service to his reputation.

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

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

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

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.