The ideal of universal literacy, in the West anyway, was first of all a Protestant idea - that everybody had to be able to read to save their soul. That idea got transposed into an idea of the importance of literacy for democratic citizenship.

The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

If we want to have a two-class society and an unemployed, welfare-crippled lower class that has no access to equality and educational opportunity and no access to jobs and is resentful and furiously angry, we can have it - that's what we've been willing to pay for so far.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too