Tony Randall Quotes

We say arts education is good for general education, but that's not the point. The arts are what great nations are remembered for. They are a mirror.

When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

The Renaissance is studded by the names of the artists and architects, with their creations recorded as great historical events.

Great music was written by the great geniuses, and you want to do it justice.

Mozart, Beethoven - how can you not want to share them with everyone and anyone? This stuff is of as great importance as the food we eat and the air we breathe.

To the humblest among them, who may be listening to me now, I want to say that the masterpiece to which you are paying historic homage this evening is a painting which he has saved.

When people say that L.A. doesn't have a culture, I think it really does: a very old culture, and very specific. There's streets named after entertainers, and statues of entertainers, and it's great. Entertainment is still art, even if it makes billions of dollars. So it's like a city built on entertainment, and art in a way.

In these confused times, the role of classical music is at the very core of the struggle to reassert cultural and ethical values that have always characterized our country and for which we have traditionally been honored and respected outside our shores.

Music is part of history, and our history has lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest music.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

If you go to Florence, it has all surface beauty, but like Venice, it's simply a museum of Renaissance times. Los Angeles is raw, uncouth and bizarre, but it's a place of substance. It has more new horizons than any other place.

History is remembered by its art, not its war machines.

When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do. I don't wanna get ideas above my station, but why shouldn't this be comparable? Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later, and it means something to us, and it always will do. It's incredibly important.

I don’t care how many laws you have to break. I want the Guggenheim [Museum] built.

Is it true that we must accept the music of another race as being that which is American? Have not the white Americans sufficient individuality to develop a characteristic style of composition.

Creativity in copyright law only means that you didn’t copy it from someone else …. Most works that are protected under copyright are not creative in the colloquial sense of the word.

I think that a society lives or dies according to its respect for - for its art.

As artists, our primary function is not to be educators - but we are at a time in history, where for us, our history needs to give context for stories that we hope to tell down the road.

I believe that the arts of a culture are terribly important and yet almost indefensible.

Shiraz' is an important part of our filmmaking and cultural history.

'Parsifal' is one of the great examples in art of a work that transcends the personality of the man who wrote it.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I think it's really important to remake things. If you never remake the classics, no one would know Shakespeare.

So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.

Like, music and songs, what we do, we can capture history as artists, so that's what I really try to do.