Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.

How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.