Poems List

Revolution is not a onetime event.

To me, the irony of this involvement with size, as I observed earlier, is the unwillingness or inability of so many Americans to identify themselves with something as vast as the United States. Bigger cars, bigger parking lots, bigger corporate structures, bigger farms, bigger drug stores, bigger supermarkets, bigger motion-picture screens. The tangible and the functional expand, while the intangible and the beautiful shrink. Left to wither is the national purpose, national educational needs, literature and theater, and our critical faculties. The national dialogue is gradually being lost in a froth of misleading self-congratulation and cliche. National needs and interests are slowly being submerged by the national preoccupation with the irrelevant.

I think that a hat which has a little cannon that fires and then goes back inside the hat is at least a decade away.

It seems to me that it is these extremists who are advocating a soft approach. Their oversimplifications and their baseless generalizations reflect the softness of those who cannot bear to face the burdens of a continuing struggle against a powerful and resourceful enemy. A truly tough approach, in my judgment, is one which accepts the challenge of communism with the courage and determination to meet it with every instrumentality of foreign policypolitical and economic as well as military, and with the willingness to see the struggle through as far into the future as may be necessary. Those who seek to meet the challengeor, in reality, to evade itby bold adventures abroad and witch hunts at home are the real devotees of softnessthe softness of seeking escape from painful realities by resort to illusory panaceas.

In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but its effects.

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

One of the things that makes God different from people is that God is always available to listen.

It is amazing how soon one becomes accustomed to the sound of ones voice, when forced to repeat a speech five or six times a day. As election day approaches, the size of the crowds grows; they are more responsive and more interested; and one derives a certain exhilaration from that which, only a few weeks before, was intensely painful. This is one possible explanation of unlimited debate in the Senate.

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

The lover steals a kiss. He incurs life imprisonment. (L'amoureux vole un baiser. Il encourt perpétuité)

What is it that makes a complete stranger dive into an icy river to save a solid-gold baby Maybe we'll never know.

I see heaven's glories shine and faith shines equal...

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

Having leveled my palace, don't erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home.

I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.

If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly.

Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.

A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.

If you ever crawl inside an old hollow log and go to sleep, and while you're in there some guys come and seal up both ends and then put it on a truck and take it to another city, boy, I don't know what to tell you.

Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly?

Talent hits a target no one else can hit Genius hits a target no one else can see.

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.