I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that and a lot less abstract stuff.

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.

Can you design a Rorschach test that's going to make everyone feel something every time - and that looks like a Rorschach test? It's easy to show a picture of a kitten or a car accident. The question is how abstract can you get and still get the audience to feel something when they don't know what's happening to them?

What is important then is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect but a certain kind of temperament the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract to express it in the most general terms to find some universal formula for it.

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.

Abstraction brings the world into more complex variable relations it can extract beauty alternative topographies ugliness and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past but beauty is the promise of the future.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly decisively for good.