Life is a picnic on a precipice.

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.

Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.

Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.

In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.

Those who hate to go to bed fear death; those who hate to get up fear life.

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.