It is unjust that Italy should claim musical pre-eminence, even forcing Italian on music as its international language, when Italy’s genius is so visual. No nation can build towns as beautiful nor claim a better right to regard nature as a shapeless substance to be redeemed by urbifaction. The Italians are not Wordsworthian. Man fulfils himself in the town. There is too much wild nature in music, and it has to be tamed into simple four-square patterns, as in Verdi and Bellini. The tenor does not proclaim Byronically to the woods and hills: he is a kind of sexy politician for the town piazza. The Italians would listen to Aaron, but not to Moses.
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
There is no magic decoding ring that will help us read our young adolescent’s feelings. Rather, what we need to do is hold out our antennae in the hope that we’ll pick up the right signals.
—The Lions Clubs International and the Quest Nation. The Surprising Years, III, ch.4 (1985)