Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.

What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.

A poem should not mean but be.

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

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

See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.