Maxwell Anderson Quotes
American - Playwright December 15, 1888 - February 28, 1959

The essence of a tragedy, or even of a serious play, is the spiritual awakening, or regeneration, of the hero.
Maxwell Anderson

If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right.
Maxwell Anderson

This liberty will look easy by and by when nobody dies to get it.
Maxwell Anderson

There are some men who lift the age they inhabit, till all men walk on higher ground in that lifetime.
Maxwell Anderson

He was a god, such as men might be, if men were gods.
Maxwell Anderson


J. Paul Getty Quotes
American - Businessman December 15, 1892 - June 6, 1976


Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil.
J. Paul Getty

If you can actually count your money, then you're not a rich man.
J. Paul Getty

The Roaring Twenties were the period of that Great American Prosperity which was built on shaky foundations.
J. Paul Getty

Money is like manure. You have to spread it around or it smells.
J. Paul Getty

Nostalgia often leads to idle speculation.
J. Paul Getty

The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.
J. Paul Getty

I hate to be a failure. I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success.
J. Paul Getty

The man who comes up with a means for doing or producing almost anything better, faster or more economically has his future and his fortune at his fingertips.
J. Paul Getty

In Japan, I was immensely impressed by the politeness, industrious nature and conscientiousness of the Japanese people.
J. Paul Getty

The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.
J. Paul Getty

In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.
J. Paul Getty

Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just sitting still?
J. Paul Getty

I've never been one to bet on the weather.
J. Paul Getty

You cannot further the Brotherhood of Man by encouraging class hatred.
J. Paul Getty

Without the element of uncertainty, the bringing off of even, the greatest business triumph would be dull, routine, and eminently unsatisfying.
J. Paul Getty

My love of fine art increased - the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see.
J. Paul Getty

There are one hundred men seeking security to one able man who is willing to risk his fortune.
J. Paul Getty

If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.
J. Paul Getty

The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavor.
J. Paul Getty

Oil is like a wild animal. Whoever captures it has it.
J. Paul Getty

If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
J. Paul Getty

Before marriage, many couples are very much like people rushing to catch an airplane; once aboard, they turn into passengers. They just sit there.
J. Paul Getty

The rich are not born sceptical or cynical. They are made that way by events, circumstances.
J. Paul Getty

You cannot bring about prosperity without discouraging thrift.
J. Paul Getty

I have never been given to envy - save for the envy I feel toward those people who have the ability to make a marriage work and endure happily.
J. Paul Getty

Five wives can't all be wrong.
J. Paul Getty

I buy when other people are selling.
J. Paul Getty

To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business.
J. Paul Getty

My formula for success is rise early, work late, and strike oil.
J. Paul Getty

My wealth is not a subject I relish discussing.
J. Paul Getty

Governments, of course, can - and do - soak the rich.
J. Paul Getty

My yachts were, I suppose, outstanding status symbols.
J. Paul Getty

I was brought up in an era when thrift was still considered a virtue.
J. Paul Getty

Whether we like it or not, men and women are not the same in nature, temperament, emotions and emotional responses.
J. Paul Getty

I am neither a homosexual nor a eunuch, nor have I ever taken any vows of chastity.
J. Paul Getty

What I learned at Oxford has been used to great advantage throughout my business career.
J. Paul Getty

I was 37 when my father died-and I no longer had any freedom of choice over what I would do with the rest of my life.
J. Paul Getty

There are heads of royal families who control hereditary fortunes that defy comprehension.
J. Paul Getty

I take pride in the creation of my wealth, in its existence and in the uses to which it has been and is being put.
J. Paul Getty

How does one measure the success of a museum?
J. Paul Getty

No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or 'get rich' in business by being a conformist.
J. Paul Getty

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.
J. Paul Getty

Control of a company does not carry with it the ability to control the price of its stock.
J. Paul Getty

I can afford to say what I wish.
J. Paul Getty

I vehemently deny that I was born a cynic and a pessimist.
J. Paul Getty

There are at least 50 cities in the world that would have liked to obtain the Getty Collection.
J. Paul Getty

Rhetoric and dialectics can't change what I have learned from observation and experience.
J. Paul Getty

I have always enjoyed the company of women and have formed deep and long-lasting friendships with many of them.
J. Paul Getty

A marriage contract to me is as binding as any in business, and I have always believed in sticking to an agreement.
J. Paul Getty

A hatred of failure has always been part of my nature.
J. Paul Getty

During the 1950s, Aristotle Onassis and I formed what grew to be a close friendship and association in several business ventures.
J. Paul Getty

The overwhelming majority of my rated wealth consists of investments in companies that produce goods and services.
J. Paul Getty

Nationalized industries are notorious for their inability to operate at a profit.
J. Paul Getty

I am - and have always been - a Methodist.
J. Paul Getty

Jack Dempsey and I became friends in the very early 1920s.
J. Paul Getty

I have absolutely no intention of marrying Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
J. Paul Getty


Oscar Niemeyer Quotes
Brazilian - Architect December 15, 1907 - December 5, 2012

Curves are the essence of my work because they are the essence of Brazil, pure and simple.
Oscar Niemeyer

The artistic capability of reinforced concrete is so fantastic - that is the way to go.
Oscar Niemeyer

Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man.
Oscar Niemeyer

I search for surprise in my architecture. A work of art should cause the emotion of newness.
Oscar Niemeyer

Surprise is key in all art.
Oscar Niemeyer

It is not with architecture that one can disseminate any political ideology.
Oscar Niemeyer

There is no reason to design buildings that are more basic and rectilinear, because with concrete you can cover almost any space.
Oscar Niemeyer

The challenge of a cathedral is very good for architectural inventiveness.
Oscar Niemeyer

Form follows beauty.
Oscar Niemeyer

Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out. If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle.
Oscar Niemeyer

Humanity needs dreams to be able to survive the miseries of daily existence, even if only for an instant.
Oscar Niemeyer

Architecture is invention.
Oscar Niemeyer

Architecture is my work, and I've spent my whole life at a drawing board, but life is more important than architecture. What matters is to improve human beings.
Oscar Niemeyer

I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say.
Oscar Niemeyer

For me beauty is valued more than anything - the beauty that is manifest in a curved line or in an act of creativity.
Oscar Niemeyer

I am a Brazilian before I am an architect. I cannot separate the two.
Oscar Niemeyer

My work is not about 'form follows function,' but 'form follows beauty' or, even better, 'form follows feminine.'
Oscar Niemeyer

Sometimes I lose a whole morning waiting on journalists and other people who look for me. But I always find some time for reading, talking to my friends and feeling what is happening in this world.
Oscar Niemeyer

I enter my studio at 9 a.m. I have lunch here, I return right away to my work and I go out to dinner at 8 p.m. My daily tasks vary very much.
Oscar Niemeyer

It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms.
Oscar Niemeyer

I think of myself as no more than 60. What I could do at 60, I can still do now.
Oscar Niemeyer

When I was very little my mother said I used to draw in the air with my fingers. I needed a pencil. Once I could hold one, I have drawn every day since.
Oscar Niemeyer

Of course, I have given my engineers some headaches over the years, but they go with me. I have always wanted my buildings to be as light as possible, to touch the ground gently, to swoop and soar, and to surprise.
Oscar Niemeyer

When students leave college, they are like children who know nothing about the problems of life, and don't have a political stance.
Oscar Niemeyer

I like talking to priests, to Catholics. Everyone has their beliefs.
Oscar Niemeyer


Muriel Rukeyser Quotes
American - Poet December 15, 1913 - February 12, 1980

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.
Muriel Rukeyser

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.
Muriel Rukeyser

The journey is my home.
Muriel Rukeyser

I think there is choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
Muriel Rukeyser

In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.
Muriel Rukeyser

However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.
Muriel Rukeyser

I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
Muriel Rukeyser

Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.
Muriel Rukeyser

Exchange is creation.
Muriel Rukeyser

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
Muriel Rukeyser

Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.
Muriel Rukeyser

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.
Muriel Rukeyser

I learned that I had been brought up as a protected, blindfolded daughter.
Muriel Rukeyser

The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser

The town of Gauley Bridge stands as a pattern for all those places where people are linked even in the middle of their suffering, where people fight against an evil condition so that other people need not go through the same fight.
Muriel Rukeyser

I hope for quick, fluent copy and memorable pictures. The words would not 'describe' the pictures; the pictures would not 'illustrate' the words. Together, they would carry a stamp and tell a story.
Muriel Rukeyser

I should like to use another word: 'audience' or 'reader' or 'listener' seems inadequate. I suggest the old word 'witness,' which includes the act of seeing and knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence.
Muriel Rukeyser

It is the single image, as used in a photograph or a painting - or the frame of a film - to which words have been added to enlarge the context. The method is not the same as that by which most paintings are named. It is closer in its performance to what dialogue does to a movie, to what the caption does to a good poster.
Muriel Rukeyser

Editors have grown timid... a brave advance is almost inevitably followed by quick back-tracking, generally by dilution and debasement of the original intention.
Muriel Rukeyser

One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.
Muriel Rukeyser

The advertising men made it clear that there were two ways of looking at ideas in a war against fascism. Those of us who were working on the project believed ideas were to be fought for; the advertising men believed they were to be sold. The audience, those at home in wartime, were not 'citizens' or 'people.' They were 'customers.'
Muriel Rukeyser

Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document.
Muriel Rukeyser