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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Barbara Mary Ward (1914–81)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 1456
AUTHOR: Barbara Mary Ward (1914–81)
QUOTATION: Every institution which grapples with the problem of molding recalcitrant material into a fairer shape—and nothing is more recalcitrant than the passions and interests of men—runs the risk of being defeated by its material. And since the institution which proposes the ideal is itself served by fallible human beings, the danger is not only that the experiment may fail but that the artists themselves, wrestling with such insidious substances as power, responsibility, and material goods, may themselves be caught by these powerful instincts, may appropriate to themselves the power they sought to tame or the riches they had hoped to divert to a nobler cause.
ATTRIBUTION: BARBARA WARD, Faith and Freedom, chapter 7, p. 94 (1954).
SUBJECTS: Power