Tadao Ando Quotes

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.

I do not think that a museum needs to engage with pop culture in order to make itself interesting to museumgoers. Museums are already interesting and engaging with pop culture for its own sake is just a quick way to seem and become dated.

The Smithsonian museums are among this country's most endearing treasures and I look forward to helping maintain and enhance their coveted works of 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.

My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.

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.

Museums, I love museums.

I have a high regard for Native languages and the pivotal role they have played in our nation's history.

We all came to see that site. We all walked around it. It is already sacred.

A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

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.

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

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

Like Love, Art ties together all the great sacred traditions because they all used creative expression, or we wouldn't know about them.

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

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

Ancient monuments 300 to 1000-plus years old are never 'renovated,' only 'restored,' a distinction that escapes the babus.

So I feel now very much like a guardian. I'm standing in front of art. I'm standing in front of cinema. I'm standing in front of Black culture. I'm standing in front of the history of America, and I'm protecting it by making art, by protecting our art, and by promoting our art.

The British Museum was our first real museum, the property of the public rather than the monarch or the church.

You can't argue that you have to have art, and prove it to anybody. Why should I give $1,000 to art when there are people starving? Of course, that's true. But just because you can't, theoretically, defend the arts, or make a sensible argument for their preservation, doesn't mean they're not important.

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.

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.