John Ruskin Quotes

In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.

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.

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

The past could liberate or imprison - it creates a nation's character, provides the nourishment or the poison a people imbibe in their very marrow.

American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.

The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds.

A nation’s attitude toward its own history is like a window into its own soul.

A nation is a work of art and a work of time.

A great silence has fallen upon the real soul of this nation.

Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life.

Our national future does not demand we revise and malign our past.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.

A country is made not by policy alone, but by its music, its entertainment shows, all of it.

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.

From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.

Queen Victoria did not regard art, letters, or music as in any way springing from national character: they were something quite apart, elegant decorations resembling a scarf or a bracelet, and in no way expressive of the soul of the country.

A nation must be embraced, rehabilitated and expressed as a tangible sign of human creativity and as an integral element of mankind's heritage.

A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory.

I wanted to take a stand against what I think was not so well established then but is thoroughly well established now, which is the substitution for a real sense of a country of a hideous distortion which you can sell to the people called 'heritage'.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.

The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'