Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Art is the daughter of pleasure.
What can art really do in the face of atrocity?
I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.
The next worse thing to a battle lost is a battle won.
Unity and simplicity are the two true sources of beauty.
I first read War And Peace about 100 years after Tolstoy wrote it.
The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history.
Silence, this will surprise you not, isn't really a Jewish concept.
Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch.
Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country.
As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.
Jews have never, ever, ever wished to be separate, unless they were forced to be.
There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.
I felt New York was a big, more stylish, more metropolitan Golders Green. I was thrilled.
Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.
History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.
The only way for us to become great, or even inimitable if possible, is to imitate the Greeks.
But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.
If I can't have the proletariat as my chosen people any longer, at least capitalism remains my Satan.
It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.
The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication.
DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.
The connoisseur might be defined as a laconic art historian, and the art historian as a loquacious connoisseur.
From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.
I am somebody who has never been able to give up '60s habits. I am the inevitable old codger on the dance floor.
I am strongly of the opinion that chronology is very important. The great arc of time is what children are wired for.
I don't really like the autumn. For me it is the beginning of winter and I hate the winter. White, the colour of death.
The older I get, the more I want to do. It beats death, decay or golf in unfortunate trousers. Peace and quiet depress me.
The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
Walking on camera is damn hard. It's a Jewish problem. The rangy stride across the blasted moor is not really a Jewish thing.
Ann Winder-Boyle's small-scale encaustic pictures always reward a second look - they have an intriguing edge of darkness about them.
Nature and abstract forms are both materials for art, and the choice of one or the other flows from historically changing interests.
I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn't an absurd thing - a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body.
I am not very relaxed about bad reviews. But I am resilient. I grieve, curse and swear, put on loud music, and get on with the next job.
Nations don't start out. There is not a particular moment when they unveil the essence of themselves. They are always a work in progress.
There is a creative act involved by the receiver as well as by the sender and that makes for innovation. Both sides are equally important.
The edge in modern painting is charged with neurosis; it meets a world that no longer confirms it but which is hostile or at best indifferent.
Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.
A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin.
If someone asks me to go to speak at, say, Princeton, I might or might not go. But if someone asks me from Norman, Oklahoma, I certainly will go.
In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.
My mother was an awful cook, an exceptionally awful kosher cook, but I stayed kosher until I got to college, even though I'd long stopped believing in God.
I wrote a staggeringly bad poem when I was 19 after a girlfriend dumped me. I seem to remember comparing her to a tarantula. It was all very E. J. Thribb of me.
Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.
The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial zodiac, too.
The movement of abstract art... bears within itself at almost every point the mark of the changing material and psychological conditions surrounding modern culture.
History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative.
At its edges, a painting makes its surrender to reality. The ways in which it can do so are endlessly revealing, as infinite as the potential forms of painting itself.
The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe.