A wise nation should cultivate a political spirit that allows opponents to cooperate without fearing an automatic execution from their core supporters. Who knew that the real rogues in American politics would be the ones who dare to get along?

First I think more Americans need to declare their independence from partisan politics on both sides. The more that Americans declare their independence the more the parties will have to compete for their votes using reason rather than the hateful appeals.

Alliance - in international politics the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.

I think that you can disagree with people and debate over their positions with issues without engaging in the politics of personal destruction.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

Their very conservatism is secondhand and they don't know what they are conserving.

So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights we'll be called a democracy.

Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about.

When you're looking that far out you're giving people their place in the universe it touches people. Science is often visual so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry it touches you.

The other side of it is that despite all that people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers their trying their hand at poetry.

Because in fact women feminists do read my poetry and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care that's what poetry is supposed to do.

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

Naming a baby is an act of poetry for many people the only creative moment of their lives.

More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

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.

I knew what book we had to write it was clear in my head it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision and no one's done it this way.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose = words in their best order - poetry = the best words in the best order.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness vigor and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet especially not against their poetry.