Poems List

Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

..remember that under our institutions there was no middle ground for the negro race between slavery and equal citizenship.

It is the high privilege and sacred duty of those now living to educate their successors and fit them, by intelligence and virtue, for the inheritance which awaits them.

The chief duty of the National Government in connection with the currency of the country is to coin money and declare its value.

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

The age of the book is almost gone.

The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.

Wonder is from surprise, and surprise stops with experience.

Action is the highest perfection and drawing forth of the utmost power, vigor, and activity of man's nature.

Most of the appearance of mirth in the world is not mirth, it is art. The wounded spirit is not seen, but walks under a disguise.

Innocence is like polished armor; it adorns and defends.

Passion is the drunkenness of the mind.

It is idleness that creates impossibilities; and where people don't care to do anything, they shelter themselves under a permission that it cannot be done.

Truth will lose its credit, if delivered by a person that has none.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.

The spirit of moderation should also be the spirit of the lawgiver.

What orators lack in depth, they make up to you in length.