Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment.

Honest history is the weapon of freedom.

The first rule of democracy is to distrust all leaders who begin to believe their own publicity.

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

The basic human rights documents-the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man-were written by political, not by religious, leaders.

What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.

History is, indeed, an argument without end.

The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.

Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics.

For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.

Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.

No matter what happens to us, as long as we have hope, we shall recover.

If you properly clean a room, it gets dirtier before it gets cleaner.

If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.

Your face may be gone, but you know who you are.

I had, of course, no model for that sort of woman being married, but I can make that up as I go along.

By unseen hands uplifted in the light Of sunset, yonder solitary cloud Floats, with its white apparel blown abroad, And wafted up to heaven.

For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter.

I've always been a procrastinator.

Pay more, eat less. Diversify your diet and eat wild foods when you can.

Life was a sorrowful throb of this Matter teaching it anguish, Teaching it hope and desire trod out too soon in the mire, Life the frail joy that regrets its briefness, life the long sorrow.