One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.

A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.

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

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

Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.

A lot of people you think you know you don't know until you find out you don't know then it may be too late to know.

Over and above the political, economic, sociological, and international implications of racial prejudices, their major significance is that they place unnecessary burdens upon human beings.

The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.

Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and blobs of colour.

Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it.

The Cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of Mammon.

If you're not content with the small things, then you won't be content with the big things.

I loved the world of imagination.

Simplicity is oftenest an adroit pretence.

As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam.

If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.

I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father," she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?

Don't you see all the people sinking down? Don't you care? Are you gonna let them drown?

I always wanted an eccentric daughter . I just never realized how well my evil plans were working.

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

The love of those we don't love in return settles on the surface and from there quickly evaporates.