Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Caro

Speed is the quiet villain in Robert Caro's worldview, and he names it with the plain force of someone who has spent decades out-waiting the news cycle. "Everything seems to be going faster and faster" isn’t just a complaint about modern life; it’s an indictment of a culture that confuses acceleration with progress. Caro, the patron saint of patience-as-method, knows how time pressure degrades ambition. When the tempo rises, the easiest thing to make is noise. What becomes rare is work with enough craft, rigor, and moral clarity to outlast its moment.

That’s why his pivot to endurance lands like a value judgment disguised as observation. "Harder to create something that endures" carries a subtext about institutions too: funding models, audience attention, managerial churn, the constant demand for novelty. Endurance isn’t romantic here; it’s logistical, expensive, and fragile. It requires continuity of standards and a willingness to bore the market with repetition until mastery appears.

Caro’s praise of the New York City Ballet is pointed because ballet is an art form that openly rejects frictionless modernity. It’s built on rehearsal, discipline, bodies aging in real time, repertory that returns and deepens. In a city optimized for reinvention, NYCB represents a counter-economy: a place where tradition is not nostalgia but infrastructure. The compliment is also a warning. If an institution like that can "succeed", it implies how easily others fail when they start chasing speed instead of permanence.