Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.

Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

Educators are aware that they can reach the youth only by making use of gang spirit and guiding it, not by working against it.

The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.

If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.

The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

Important insights ought never to be limited to the group from which may arise.

There is no cramming for a test of character. It always comes as a pop quiz.

So long as it doesn't get to the point where you don't remember whose opera you're listening to, I'm willing to experiment.

Don't teach too many postures; just the main ones, and hold them for a long time.

Professors simply can't discuss a thing. Habit compels them to deliver a lecture.

All singers must be crazy. But we're a nice family of crazy people

I still dream that it was you. No matter how many times I've looked, in my dreams it's always been you who were meant to be my queen.

Tell me your doctrine of the Fall and I will tell you the state of your theology.

If you don't own Gold, you know neither history nor economics.

Lawyers-a profession it is to disguise matters.