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.

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

But on second thought after I decreed the state of emergency I came to the conclusion that that was impossible to achieve without bloodshed because the street protesters were full of anger and nearly out of control. This is why I thought we needed to find another way out.

Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger there the sweetest pain here consuming hatred there the childlike smile of serene humility.

It's amazing how age after age in country after country and in all languages Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

I feel the 21st century is another new age. Not only can we collaborate again with nature but we have to. It's an emergency.

It were a real increase of human happiness could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels or rendered otherwise invisible and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings till they emerged sadder and wiser at the age of twenty-five.