May Knowledge reshape your lives so that your greater destiny may come into view
To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.
At the ballet, you really feel like you're in the presence of something outside the rest of your life. Higher than the rest of your life.
Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.
I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives
Robert Moses wasn't elected to anything. We're taught that in a democracy power comes from being elected. He had more power than anyone, and he held it for 48 years
The New York City Ballet is obviously speaking to a whole new generation and bringing it the same wonder and beauty that it brought previous generations
A clear thought, a pure affection, a resolute act of a virtuous will, have a dignity of quite another kind, and far higher than accumulations of brick and granite and plaster and stucco, however cunningly put together.
We are all happy when U. S. soldiers are killed week in and week out. The killing of U. S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory.
To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity. (pg. 192-193, People, Land, and Community)
Why do humans make art? It's how we evolved.