Poets are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts. |
Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world. |
The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it. |
The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity. |
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself. |
The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defense are silent |
There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream. |
There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience. |
There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience. |
To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers. |
To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night - brothers who see now they are truly brothers. |
To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge. |
We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves. |
We have learned the answers, all the answers:/ It is the question that we do not know. |
We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent. |