History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard..

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself..

If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd..

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience..

The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his cou….

Man depends on God for all things: God depends on man for one. Without man's love God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is the one thi….

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 possibil….

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd t….

Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. We think….

Our reliance in this country is on the inquiring, individual human mind. Our strength is founded there; our resilience, our ability to face an ever-c….

A self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer..

As things are now going the peace we make, what peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace in ….

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only, th….

If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sound….

Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of cho….

The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which….

Poetry which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt - an image of the world in which men can again believe..

The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty..

Writers . . . write to give reality to experience..

Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast..

America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them..