Quotes by Kenneth Clark

• To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.
• 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.
• We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
• The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
• Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
• No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
• Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
• All great civilizations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.