Leon Botstein Quotations

When you have a great building, you are inspired to do something great. For us, the building had the immediate impact of raising the aspirations of everyone involved in the arts.

To subject colleges to uniform standards is to trivialize what goes on in higher education. Excellence comes in many unusual ways. You cannot apply the rules of high-stakes testing in high schools to universities.

It means a lot to my children. For them, it's a big deal because the Grammy nominations are so visible on the pop side.

If Beethoven were sent to nursery school today, they would medicate him, and he would be a postal clerk.

At best, most college presidents are running something that is somewhere between a faltering corporation and a hotel.

No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician - and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member - pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity.

I know nothing about this subject, but I do have prejudices, which I am more than happy to share with you.

Schooling, by definition, must be conservative. It is naturally dependent on an older generation’s level of knowledge and sense of values.

Learning, like love, death and eating, are fundamental human activities. It's at the core of human existence and its character has a resilience of continuity that is part of what makes up human nature. That is not fundamentally going to change.