Robert Hughes
It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.Collection: Mean
One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.Collection: Music
Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?Collection: Taste
I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.Collection: Art
The point of a library's existence is not persuasion or evangelism, but knowledge. It is irrelevant to the good library whether, as an institution, it shares or promotes your core values or mine, or the Attorney General's or Saddam Hussein's. The library is always an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders.Collection: Choices
One thing is sure: the Sagrada Familia is the first Catholic temple whose bacon was ever saved by Shinto tourism. Not even Gaudi, who believed in miracles, could have forseen that.Collection: Miracle
Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist.Collection: Mistake
It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.Collection: Art
There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.Collection: Greatness
We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism.Collection: America
For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.Collection: Horse
Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the publicCollection: Stress
We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemismCollection: Wisdom
We've got a recipe for disaster. It's huge -- this combination of body image issues and the drug's weight loss appeal.Collection: Loss
There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.Collection: Zeitgeist
If you want to be successful in the gym, in the classroom, in college or when you get out and go into the world of work, that is going to be determined by how hard you are willing to work.Collection: Motivational