Poems List

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world -- it's the American way of looking at things.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.

What we all hope in reaching for a book, is to meet a man of our own heart, to experience tragedies and delights which we ourselves lack the courage to invite, to dream dreams which will render life more hallucinating, perhaps also to discover a philosophy of life which will make us more adequate in meeting the trials and ordeals which beset us. To merely add to our store of knowledge or improve our culture, whatever that may mean, seems worthless to me.

There are but few saints amongst scientists, as among other men, but truth itself is a goal comparable with sanctity.

One of the greatest pleasures of music is to make other people listen to it; to feel, for just a moment, a tiny part of an ideal world in which everything is good, beautiful, harmony, love.

The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert, and so on.

If you neglect to recharge a battery, it dies. And if you run full speed ahead without stopping for water, you lose momentum to finish the race.

Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.

It's a venture capitalist's job to connect the dots and it's an entrepreneur's job to bring them very close together

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.

Givers have to set limits because takers rarely do.

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.

We must overcome the notion that we must be regular. It robs us of the chance to be extraordinary and leads us to the mediocre.

It is with trifles and when he is off guard that a man best reveals his character.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century.

There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.