This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men ... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I can bear it.

The ecstasy is so short but the forgetting is so long.

Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful stroke!

What has miserable, inefficient Mexico...to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?

I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night, Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation: The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen closer, I find its purpose and place up there toward the November sky.