To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

I longed to know the world's name.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.