Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.

Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.

In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.

A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable

Concerning no subject would [George Bernard] Shaw be deterred by the minor accident of total ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.

The best evidence of a mind is when you change it

Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.