“What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?”

English writer and art critic

John Ruskin was an English Victorian polymath, active as a writer, lecturer, art historian, art critic, draughtsman, and philanthropist. He is known for the breadth of his work and for the many fields he wrote about. His writing ranged across art and architecture, political economy, education, museology, geology, botany, ornithology, literature, history, and myth. That range made him an unusually wide-ranging public intellectual, with work that moved freely between the arts and the natural world.