Kenneth Quotes

If you've been to Moscow, it's a really exciting and great city, but it still feels like you should be a little careful about which way you're going to step.

I don’t feel in a kind of race or competition with him or anybody else, because that kind of reactive thing isn’t good, or isn’t useful for natural creative instincts

I wanted to have a place and a space, and a building, in which to create a season of work I am here because the idea of a theatrical home is very appealing to me

Creation implies authority in the sense of originator.

How strong is a faith that can't stand up to a few honest questions?

The sight of one man standing up to challenge God and country is something that Madison, Jefferson and Franklin would cheer, and every American can celebrate.

The investment banks should either choose to be regulated as banks or should arrange to conduct their affairs to not require the stop-gap support of the Federal Reserve.

We all know that great leaders can create great successes...success for the Chicago public education fund is to bring great leaders into Chicago's public schools.

I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.

Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.

The great artist takes what he needs.

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.

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

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

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

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.

You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.

Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.

All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.

To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.

Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well.

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

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.

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

Energy is eternal delight; and from the earliest times human beings have tried to imprison it in some durable hieroglyphic. It is perhaps the first of all the subjects of art.

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

Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.

Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.

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.

I don't think at my age... you can start ruling people out in politics.

I've come to learn that the best time to debate family members is when they have good in their mouths.

The first thing I wanted to do, as a boy, was to be a skier, because I had seen film footage of somebody skiing.

I had a whole Scottish existence until we moved to London when I was four.

I was fantastically well versed by the time I left school. I had a teacher who put A Clockwork Orange my way, and Catcher in the Rye.

What exists, is possible.

The proposition that the meek (that is the adaptable and serviceable), inherit the earth is not merely a wishful sentiment of religion, but an iron law of evolution.

The economy of the future might be called the "spaceman economy," in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything.

Communication can only take place among equals.

[The consumer is] the supreme mover of economic order... for whom all goods are made and towards whom all economic activity is directed.

All knowledge is gained through an orderly loss of information.

It is absurd to suppose we can think of nature as a system apart from knowledge, for it is knowledge that is increasingly determining the course of nature.

Know this: though love is weak and hate is strong, Yet hate is short, and love is very long.

The image of the frontier is probably one of the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we should find it hard to get rid of.

Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand.

Physicists can only talk to other physicists and economists to economists... sociologists often cannot even understand each other.

The most fundamental form of integrative power is the power of love.

The social system tends to be dominated by images... especially of the future, which act cybernetically, constantly guided by perceived divergences between the real and the ideal.

The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.

Humble, honest, ignorance is one of the finest flowers of the human spirit