David Rockefeller

They decided to establish a museum of modern art where works by contemporary artists would be shown. Mother was viewed as a very progressive person, and not everybody liked the paintings she bought.

As children we recognized that we belonged to an unusual, even exceptional, family, but the effect was different on each of us.

MoMA is doubling its space, and I decided to raise the money for it.

My grandfather, along with Carnegie, was a pioneer in philanthropy, which my father then practiced on a very large scale.

The role of a museum of modern art is to make a good selection and identify what we believe to be the coming movements, and that requires taste.

Mother’s interest in contemporary American artists emerged during the 1920s.

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

If you believe, you will. If you don’t, you won’t.

I think everyone has their own set of problems, and sometimes I feel I’m in the middle of the biggest challenge of my life just trying to maintain normalcy in a kind of crazy lifestyle.

I had learned one of the bitter lessons of life: never try to regain the past, the fire will have become ashes.

Wide awake and so confused.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

I don’t expect to retire. Every man must work, that’s his natural destiny.

Would you believe me if I said you were three shades short of all my favorite hues and that I’ve been trying for years to pick words from my garden throat in attempts to explain to you all the things I can’t explain. Or what if I said I have nothing to say other than I love you in the simplest of ways.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

People are used to being coddled.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.