He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies but it's clear that in America poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

We travel together passengers on a little spaceship dependent on it's vulnerable reserves of air and soil all committed for our safety to it's security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care the work and the love we give our fragile craft.

There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made between patriotism which is attachment to a way of life and nationalism which is the insistence that your way of life deserves to rule over other ways of life.

I believe the accepted model of capitalism that demands endless growth deserves the blame for the destruction of nature and it should be displaced. Failing that I try to work with those companies and help them change the way they think about our resources.

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.

The primary and most beautiful of Nature's qualities is motion which agitates her at all times but this motion is simply a perpetual consequence of crimes she conserves it by means of crimes only.

Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.

All we had aboard the ship that morning was one Annapolis graduate and three reserves.