“The only road to freedom is self-education in art. Art is not a luxury for any advancedcivilization; it is a necessity, without which creative intelligence will wither and die. Evenin economically troubled times, support for the arts should be a national imperative.Dance, for example, requires funding not only to secure safe, roomy rehearsal space butto preserve the indispensible continuity of the teacher-student link. American culture hasbecome unbalanced by its obsession with the blood sport of politics, a voracious vortexconsuming everything in its path. History shows that, for both individuals and nations,political power is transient. America's true legacy is its ideal of liberty, which has inspiredinsurgencies around the world. Politicians and partisans of both the Right and the Leftmust recognize that art too is a voice of liberty, requiring nurture without intrusion. Artunites the spiritual and material realms. In an age of alluring, magical machines, thesociety that forgets art risks losing its soul.”

“Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.”

“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”

“A woman simply is, but a man must become.”

“Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.”

“I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.”

“Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.”

“Video games and YouTube.com are creatively booming, even though Web design, as demonstrated by the ugly clutter of most major news sites, is in the pits.”

“It's aggravating that Hollywood has never gotten credit for the role it played in promoting modern design.”

“Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world - which, like it or not, is modern reality.”

“A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.”