Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

To tell the truth is to become beautiful.

If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.

That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.

And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea: we are the ones we have been waiting for.