Dedicated to
WALTER E. DISNEY

• "Mickey was simply a little personality assigned to the purposes of laughter."
  
• "Mickey Mouse is, to me, a symbol of independence. He was a means to an end." (circa 1930)
  
• "When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it's because he's so human, and that is the secret to his popularity." (circa 1953)
  
• "All we ever intended of him [Mickey Mouse], or expected from him, is that he should continue to make people everywhere chuckle with him and at him."
  
• "Donald is a very outrageous fellow, with bad manners and a worse temper, and everyone is fond of him."
  
• "It is the constitutional privilege of every American to become cultered or to grow up like Donald Duck."
  
• "The important thing is the family. If you can keep the family together - and that's the backbone of our whole business, catering to families - that's what we hope to do."
  
• "I think what I want Disneyland to be most of all is a happy place - a place where adults and children can experience some of the wonders of life, of adventure, and feel better because of it." (1955)
  
• "Disneyland is like Alice stepping through the Looking Glass, to step through the portals of Disneyland will be like entering another world."
  
• "I wanted something alive, something that could grow, something I could keep plussing wtih ideas; the Park is that. Not only can I add things but even the trees will keep growing. The things will get more beautiful each year."
  
• "You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world...but it takes people to make the dream a reality."
  
• "Disneyland is a work of love. We didn't go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money."
  
• "Fantasy, if it's really convincing, can't become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time."
  
• "It has that thing - the imagination, and the feeling of happy excitement - I knew when I was a kid."
  
• "We are not trying to entertain the critics. I'll take my chances with the public." (1958)
  
• "My brother (Roy) called me in and said that we owed the bank four-and-one-half million dollars. And I began to laugh. And he said, 'What are you laughing at?' and I said, 'I was just thinking back when we couldn't borrow a thousand dollars.'" (1940)
  
• "I can't think of the pictorial story without thinking of the complementary music that will fulfill it." (1958)
  
• "I respect nature very much, and by watching and observing creatures of nature, man can learn a lot."
• "I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess."
• "I love the nostalgic myself. I hope we never lose some of the things of the past."
• "People sort of live in the dark about things. A lot of young people think the future is closed to them, that everything has been done. This is not so. There are still plenty of avenues to be explored."
  
• "Why do we have to grow up? I know more adults who have the children's approach to life. They're people who don't give a hang what the Joneses do. You see them at Disneyland every time you go there. They are not afraid to be delighted with simple pleasures, and they have a degree of contentment with what life has brought - sometimes it isn't much, either."

"It would take more time than anybody has around the daily news shops to think of the right thing to say about Walt Disney.

He was an original; not just an American original, but an original, period. He was a happy accident; one of the happiest this century has experienced; and judging by the way it's been behaving in spite of all Disney tried to tell it about laughter, love, children, puppies and sunrises, the century hardly deserved him.

He probably did more to heal or at least to soothe troubled human spirits than all the psychiartrists in the world. There can't be many adults in the allegedly civilized parts of the globe who did not inhabit Disney's mind and imagination at least for a few hours and feel better for the visitation.

It may be true, as somebody said, that while there is no highbrow in a lowbrow, there is some lowbrow in every highbrow.

But what Walt Disney seemed to know was that while there is very little grown-up in a child, there is a lot of child in every grown-up. To a child this weary world is brand new, gift wrapped; Disney tried to keep it that way for adults...

By the conventional wisdom, mighty mice, flying elephants, Snow White and Happy, Grumpy, Sneezy and Dopey - all these were fantasy, escapism from reality. It's a question of whether they are any less real, any more fantastic than intercontinental missiles, poisoned air, defoiliated forests, and scraps from the moon. This is the age of fantasy, however you look at it, but Disney's fantasy wasn't lethal. People are saying we'll never see his like again."