“This is a mission and a vision to do good as well as doing well.”

Art is what everyone knows it is.

The writing of histories – as Goethe once noted – is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past…. The writing of history liberates us from history.

History is various and sinuous and no essential part of the human spirit is ever wholly absent from it.

Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination.

Historical judgement is not a variety of knowledge, it is knowledge itself; it is the form which completely fills and exhausts the field of knowing, leaving no room for anything else.

All history is contemporary history.

Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human… No people will be truly free till all are free.

The translation called good has original value as a work of art.

Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination. Images are it’s only wealth. It does not classify objects, it does not pronounce them real or imaginary, does not qualify them does not define them; it feels and presents them.

Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.

I think every album you have, especially if it’s done well, you feel like you’re competing with yourself.

Well, my grandfather was a minister and sort of Protestant, and this was rather depressing to me.

In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.

I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will.

If such a young nation as the U.S. could make it to superpower status, we could do it as well.

As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.

Some of it is carefully structured and well-thought-out. That’s where the real danger lies.