I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. 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 try to learn from history.
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.
We are part of a great whole. All living things are our brothers and sisters.
Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.
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.
I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.
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.
I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.
The recognized achievements of some Negroes, despite rigid racial barriers, indicate that society by its prejudices may be depriving itself of valuable contributions from many others. It is now doubtful whether America can afford the luxury of such a waste of human resources.
Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.
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.
Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it.
The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and-above all-economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.
All color is no color.
No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling... The desire to grasp and be united with another human is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgement of what is known as 'pure form' is inevitably influenced by it, and one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these instincts cannot be hidden.
The great artist takes what he needs.
The nude gains its enduring value from the fact that it reconciles several contrary states. It takes the most sensual and immediately interesting object, the human body, and puts it out of reach of time and desire; it takes the most purely rational concept of which mankind is capable, mathematical order, and makes it a delight to the senses; and it takes the vague fears of the unknown and sweetens them by showing that the gods are like men and may be worshiped for their life-giving beauty rather than their death-dealing powers.
In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.
Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.
The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.
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.
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.
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