Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

When you look at our world the truth is that we're all under the influence of politics.

There's a nastiness out there that wants to harm me with words. These are my enemies - the ideologues the populists the columnists who don't like the fact that I take them on toe-to-toe. What I try to do is tell the truth. It's not the coin of the realm in politics.

In argument truth always prevails finally in politics falsehood always.

If there is one eternal truth of politics it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

It's not that I'm universally loved. We know I'm not in New Jersey. But what they do say in New Jersey is 'We like him and we think he's telling us the truth.' I think we need to have that type of politics on the national level.

Telling the truth and confronting the challenge is what politics is about.

Everybody in America is soft and hates conflict. The cure for this both in politics and social life is the same - hardihood. Give them raw truth.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics.

One of the reasons people hate politics is that truth is rarely a politician's objective. Election and power are.

I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats we will stop telling the truth about them.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there I know there will be people who will listen.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth to learn how to do that to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

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

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

When truth has no burning then it is philosophy when it gets burning from the heart it becomes poetry.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

Truth be told ginormous portions have become a pet peeve of mine.