Anton Seidl Quotes

I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.

I was using them as teachers for technique but I was never trying to be a folk.

In any society that is governed by the rule of law, some form of morality is always imposed. It's inescapable.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

I have always served the public to the best of my ability. Why? Because, like every other man, it is to my interest to do so.

Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.

For me, I'm sort of a wanna-be composer, and I love being involved with the arrangements.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

I lived in a world where social arrangements were taken for granted and assumed to be timeless. A child's obligation was to learn these usages, not to question them. The complexities of racial deportment were of a piece with learning manners and etiquette more generally.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

I didn't grow up with any concept of people being deviants unless they mistreated others.

All ladies arriving here as strangers it seems expect to be visited by the wives of the heads of the departments and even by the President’s wife. Mrs. Madison subjected herself to this torture, … but from which having begun the practice, she never found an opportunity of receding from.

The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilized society.

I think I still want to be a music director as a grown man.

Instead of only doing songs and item dance,' we need to have a hard look at ourselves not only as actors, but people in this society.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

True modesty avoids everything that is criminal; false modesty everything that is unfashionable.

Without an acquaintance with the rules of propriety, it is impossible for the character to be established

The superior man does what is proper to the station in which he is; he does not desire to go beyond this.

The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.

There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

A person of “good character” was one who acted in accordance with the expectations of his community

The conventions of society are all in the interests of morality. If you're conventional, you'll be good, in a negative sense, of course.

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.