Arts Education Quotes

“Without the freedom to criticize, there is no true praise.”
― Beaumarchais Pierre Augustin Caron De

“She missed -- without knowing what she missed-- paints and crayons”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“It was good to be gay on Top of the Pops years before it was good to be gay in Parliament, or gay in church, or gay on the rugby pitch. And it’s not just gay progress that happens in this way: 24 had a black president before America did. Jane Eyre was a feminist before Germaine Greer was born. A Trip to the Moon put humans on the Moon in 1902.

This is why recent debates about the importance of the arts contain, at core, an unhappy error of judgment. In both the arts cuts—29 percent of the Arts Council’s funding has now gone—and the presumption that the new, “slimmed down” National Curriculum will “squeeze out” art, drama and music, there lies a subconscious belief that the arts are some kind of . . . social luxury: the national equivalent of buying some overpriced throw pillows and big candle from John Lewis. Policing and defense, of course, remain very much “essentials”—the fridge and duvets in our country’s putative semi-detached house.

But art—painting, poetry, film, TV, music, books, magazines—is a world that runs constant and parallel to ours, where we imagine different futures—millions of them—and try them out for size. Fantasy characters can kiss, and we, as a nation, can all work out how we feel about it, without having to involve real shy teenage lesbians in awful sweaters, to the benefit of everyone’s notion of civility.”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranthology

“I have never found a solo life is devastated.At times it is lonely.It is a selfish life doing only the things you want to do. That is what the general public are jealous of but are not prepared to take the loneliness to reap the excitement that only solos can accept without having to consider others.”
― Theresa Sjoquist

“The rebellion against fascism is immensely important to society when its grip on our dreamers strangles the creativity out of our ambition, finally snuffing out all progress as we know it, and as if implanting a tombstone, parks institutions in its place.”
― Oliver Oyanadel

“How ironic that in a building where so much emphasis and importance is put on art, decor, painting, sculptures - a place where they want to surround themselves with all these beautiful things - I need to remind them just how important the arts are to young people.”
― Andria Zafirakou, Those Who Can, Teach: What It Takes To Make the Next Generation

“Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

“No-one has the right to terminate a person's life with a gun, a knife, or a makutu (spell).”
― Theresa Sjoquist, Yvonne Rust: Maverick Spirit

“It was hard to get jobs on farms doing wool-classing, but I got them. They had to learn to like a female wool-classer.”
― Theresa Sjoquist

“It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture