Biography

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilization. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.

It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

Works, bought with love and installed in harmonious surroundings, retain, in some mysterious way, a touching quality which they inevitably lose in a public gallery.

My ear is trained to catch the quiet groans of cultured people on the mention of that word [television] but I refuse to believe that the millions of our countrymen, whose sole need of mental and imaginative stimulus television is fast becoming, should be condemned, on some pessimistic theory, to what is stupid shallow and crude. All the great disasters of the world have taken place from intellectuals shrugging their shoulders and throwing in their hands.