Whether one believes or not religion is as real a force in the life of the world as economics or politics and it demands fair-minded attention. Even if you think the entire religious enterprise is at best misguided and at worst counterproductive it remains vital inspiring great good and sometimes great evil.

It would be great if politics were fact-based but it is not and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution not the country.

War is not the continuation of politics with different means it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.

Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself.

We have I fear confused power with greatness.

Justice sir is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.

A war for a great principle ennobles a nation.

Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

Fiction will always be my greatest love with poetry close behind.

That's one of the great things about poetry one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop as it were.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

Well I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it it was my great refuge through adolescence.

Well the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words that is to say the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats almost 100 years old now and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

The romanticised life where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die be reborn die again but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

There is poetry even in prose in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

Narrative art the novel from Murasaki to Proust has produced great works of poetry.

I wanted to reimagine the role in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents events preoccupations and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.