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

Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.

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

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.

To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night ~ brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.

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-changing future and to master it. We are not frozen into the backward-facing impotence of those societies, fixed in the rigidness of an official dogma, to which the future is the mirror of the past. We are free to make the future for ourselves.