Zoltan Kodaly Quotes
Hungarian - Composer December 16, 1882 - March 6, 1967

To teach a child an instrument without first giving him preparatory training and without developing singing, reading and dictating to the highest level along with the playing is to build upon sand.
Zoltan Kodaly

Real art is one of the most powerful forces in the rise of mankind, and he who renders it accessible to as many people as possible is a benefactor of humanity.
Zoltan Kodaly

I would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies, to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten, too. It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody to understand their works in twenty years' time.
Zoltan Kodaly

We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: in silence, but imagining the sound.
Zoltan Kodaly

Let us take our children seriously! Everything else follows from this... only the best is good enough for a child.
Zoltan Kodaly

Singing connected with movements and action is a much more ancient, and, at the same time, more complex phenomenon than is a simple song.
Zoltan Kodaly

The laws of morals and the laws of music are the same.
Zoltan Kodaly


Noel Coward Quotes
English - Playwright December 16, 1899 - March 26, 1973


If you must have motivation, think of your paycheck on Friday.
Noel Coward

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
Noel Coward

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
Noel Coward

I'm not a heavy drinker, I can sometimes go for hours without touching a drop.
Noel Coward

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
Noel Coward

Just say the lines and don't trip over the furniture.
Noel Coward

Work is much more fun than fun.
Noel Coward

Squash - that's not exercise, it's flagellation.
Noel Coward

We have no reliable guarantee that the afterlife will be any less exasperating than this one, have we?
Noel Coward

Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade.
Noel Coward

Mona Lisa looks as if she has just been sick, or is about to be.
Noel Coward

It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
Noel Coward

I have always paid income tax. I object only when it reaches a stage when I am threatened with having nothing left for my old age - which is due to start next Tuesday or Wednesday.
Noel Coward

I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.
Noel Coward

I'll go through life either first class or third, but never in second.
Noel Coward

Let's drink to the spirit of gallantry and courage that made a strange Heaven out of unbelievable Hell, and let's drink to the hope that one day this country of ours, which we love so much, will find dignity and greatness and peace again.
Noel Coward

The higher the building the lower the morals.
Noel Coward

Success took me to her bosom like a maternal boa constrictor.
Noel Coward

I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise.
Noel Coward

Someday I suspect, when Jesus has definitely got me for a sunbeam, my works may be adequately assessed.
Noel Coward

People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what's wrong with it.
Noel Coward

My body has certainly wandered a good deal, but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough.
Noel Coward

There's always something fishy about the French.
Noel Coward

That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together.
Noel Coward

I don't believe in astrology. The only stars I can blame for my failures are those that walk about the stage.
Noel Coward

I've sometimes thought of marrying - and then I've thought again.
Noel Coward

Never mind, dear, we're all made the same, though some more than others.
Noel Coward


V. S. Pritchett Quotes
British - Writer December 16, 1900 - March 20, 1997

How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.
V. S. Pritchett

The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony.
V. S. Pritchett

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
V. S. Pritchett

Life - how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
V. S. Pritchett

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
V. S. Pritchett

The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.
V. S. Pritchett


Margaret Mead Quotes
American - Scientist December 16, 1901 - November 15, 1978


Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
Margaret Mead

Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have.
Margaret Mead

Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.
Margaret Mead

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.
Margaret Mead

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.
Margaret Mead

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead

What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.
Margaret Mead

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.
Margaret Mead

Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.
Margaret Mead

I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had.
Margaret Mead

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.
Margaret Mead

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
Margaret Mead

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.
Margaret Mead

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
Margaret Mead

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.
Margaret Mead

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.
Margaret Mead

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.
Margaret Mead

We have nowhere else to go... this is all we have.
Margaret Mead

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.
Margaret Mead

Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.
Margaret Mead

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.
Margaret Mead

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.
Margaret Mead

We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.
Margaret Mead

I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.
Margaret Mead

Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.
Margaret Mead

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.
Margaret Mead

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.
Margaret Mead

Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.
Margaret Mead

As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.
Margaret Mead

It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.
Margaret Mead

I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don't agree with or like.
Margaret Mead

I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.
Margaret Mead

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.
Margaret Mead

Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.
Margaret Mead

Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.
Margaret Mead

Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire.
Margaret Mead

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
Margaret Mead

Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.
Margaret Mead

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
Margaret Mead

The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.
Margaret Mead

The pains of childbirth were altogether different from the enveloping effects of other kinds of pain. These were pains one could follow with one's mind.
Margaret Mead

And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.
Margaret Mead


Murray Kempton Quotes
American - Journalist December 16, 1917 - May 5, 1997

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by men incapable of it.
Murray Kempton

We are a government of laws. Any laws some government hack can find to louse up a man who's down.
Murray Kempton

A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.
Murray Kempton

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.
Murray Kempton

A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.
Murray Kempton

A man can look upon his life and accept it as good or evil; it is far, far harder for him to confess that it has been unimportant in the sum of things.
Murray Kempton

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.
Murray Kempton

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.
Murray Kempton

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.
Murray Kempton