Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.

But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.

There's nothing wrong with the world. What's wrong is our way of looking at it.

Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.

But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind.

The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.

Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.