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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Alfred Whitney Griswold (1906–63)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 898
AUTHOR: Alfred Whitney Griswold (1906–63)
QUOTATION: Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.
ATTRIBUTION: A. WHITNEY GRISWOLD, president of Yale, baccalaureate address, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, June 9, 1957.—Congressional Record, June 11, 1957, vol. 103, Appendix, p. A4545.
SUBJECTS: Individual