Portal:Opera/Selected quote/27

Oscar Hammerstein I
I sincerely believe that nothing will make better citizenship than familiarity with grand opera. It lifts one so out of the sordid affairs of life and makes material things seem so petty, so inconsequential, that it places one for the time being, at least, in a higher and better world.

Source edit

Quoted in Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier, Cultivating Differences: Symbolic boundaries and the making of inequality, University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 35. ISBN0226468143