Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

We haven't come a long way, we've come a short way. If we hadn't come a short way, no one would be calling us baby.

reaction isn't action - that is, it isn't truly creative.

power is not a thing to be owned. But if you believe that it is such a thing, losing it becomes a possibility to fear. That fear, I think, is one reason for the dark projections of a catastrophic future that are so widespread, in our dual society. The present powerful, being committed to polarization, expect that any new deal will overturn the one that set them in authority; that the last shall be first and the first last, role reversal everywhere, men as slaves, women as masters, in a revolution of contradiction.

Art is a framework, a kind of living trellis, on which public dreaming can shape itself.

Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.

Man's world' and 'woman's place' have confronted each other since Scylla first faced Charybdis. ... if women have only a place, clearly the rest of the world must belong to someone else and, therefore, in default of God, to men.