Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Tippett

Tippett’s line has the modesty of a shrug and the stubbornness of a creed. “I remain a humanist” reads like a decision renewed under pressure: not a fashionable label, but a stance held after seeing plenty of reasons to drop it. Coming from a 20th-century composer who lived through world wars, ideological extremisms, and the steady mechanization of daily life, the word “remain” does the heavy lifting. It implies attrition. Humanism here isn’t naive optimism; it’s an ethic of attention to people as complicated moral and emotional instruments, capable of dissonance and surprising resolution.

Then he pivots: “We are a very curious race.” It’s a sly, double-edged compliment. “Curious” can mean imaginative, exploratory, and playful - the very qualities that make art possible. It can also mean strange, self-contradictory, prone to building cathedrals and killing fields with the same hands. Tippett’s choice of “race” casts humanity as a single species with shared patterns, not a set of competing tribes. In a century obsessed with dividing lines, that’s a pointed refusal.

As a composer, Tippett is also talking shop. Curiosity is the motor of new sound: the willingness to ask what happens if you push harmony, form, or voice past what’s comfortable. The subtext is a defense of creative modernism with a moral core: experimentation isn’t escapism, it’s a way of staying human when history tries to flatten us into slogans.