Once you start saying 'Let's talk political my own politics my own aspirations ' it can become not just distracting in that it takes time but it can become confusing and frustrating and is this now a political agenda or a governmental agenda.

It's much easier to wear a Chairman Mao button and shake your fists in the air and all that then to actually read the Communist manifesto and things like that and actually become involved in politics.

The precise point at which a tax deduction becomes a 'loophole' or a tax incentive becomes a 'subsidy for special interests' is one of the great mysteries of politics.

One of the big changes in politics has been because families individuals have felt worried insecure... worried about the economy worried about their jobs worried about their kids' futures... actually the disconnect between the public and media discourse and people's everyday concerns has become bigger not smaller.

The message that I gave on the - on the steps today was that you need to stand for those things that are right and empower the individual. Believe in the power of one person. Don't believe that you can't do it. Everybody wants - everybody wants a shot. That we can all agree on. Beyond that it becomes politics. I'm not talking politics.

Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.

Politics is the diversion of trivial men who when they succeed at it become important in the eyes of more trivial men.

When governments become large voters cannot exercise close oversight otherwise known as political power.

A politician will do anything to keep his job - even become a patriot.

In order to become the master the politician poses as the servant.

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President I'm beginning to believe it.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough you scratch it.

Since the printing press came into being poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate or just never come back I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much and so I just went.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write but it's not.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

So poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

I work on words mostly toward them being poetry or short stories and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

In fact in lyric poetry truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.