Quotes from Kenneth Clark

All great civilizations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.

The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.

Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.

The great artist takes what he needs.

Energy is eternal delight; and from the earliest times human beings have tried to imprison it in some durable hieroglyphic. It is perhaps the first of all the subjects of art.

Look at this charming donkey!

Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.