Kenneth Clark

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

Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.

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

It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.