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 think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves but which they identify with from the interior.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric but of the quarrel with ourselves poetry.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being to which we rarely penetrate for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Perhaps it is because cats do not live by human patterns do not fit themselves into prescribed behavior that they are so united to creative people.

People who keep dogs are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves.

War is not the quintessential emergency in which man has to prove himself as my generation learned at its school desks in the days of the Kaiser rather peace is the emergency in which we all have to prove ourselves.

We can only move to a long-term resolution regarding terrorism and war by planting seeds of peace. We have to start with ourselves.

We have peace with God as soon as we believe but not always with ourselves. The pardon may be past the prince's hand and seal and yet not put into the prisoner's hand.