A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

— Leonard Bernstein

Any great art work … revives and readopts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

— Leonard Bernstein

I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.

— Leonard Bernstein

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

— Leonard Bernstein

I've been all over the world, and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

— Leonard Bernstein

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

— Leonard Bernstein

Music. . . Can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

— Leonard Bernstein

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

— Leonard Bernstein

Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.

— Leonard Bernstein

The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist; it is a gift we all share; to some degree or other all of us are endowed with the powers of fantasy, the dullest of dullards among us has the gift of dreams at night - visions and yearnings and hopes. Everyone can also think; it is the quality thought that makes the difference - not just the quality of logical thinking, but of imaginative thinking. And our greatest thinkers, those who have radically changed our world, have always arrived at their truths by dreaming them; they are first fantasized, and only then subjected to proof.

— Leonard Bernstein