Quotes to inspire and reflect

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

did you ever / notice that when / a politician / does get an idea / he usually / gets it all wrong.

The friend of humanity cannot recognize a distinction between what is political and what is not. There is nothing that is not political.

Political action is the highest responsibility of a citizen.

The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.

All of us in the Senate live in an iron lung—the iron lung of politics, and it is no easy task to emerge from that rarified atmosphere in order to breathe the same fresh air our constituents breathe.

Popular men, / They must create strange monsters, and then quell them, / To make their arts seem something.

I could not be leading a religious life unless I identified myself with the whole of mankind, and that I could not do unless I took part in politics.

Genuine politics—politics worthy of the name, and the only politics I am willing to devote myself to—is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community, and serving those who will come after us.

Spare me the sight / of this thankless breed, these politicians / who cringe for favors from a screaming mob / and do not care what harm they do their friends, / providing they can please a crowd!

Persistence in one opinion has never been considered a merit in political leaders.

[Political skill] is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month,

It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.

Politics cannot stop to study psychology. Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.

Even more important than winning the election is governing the nation. That is the test of a political party—the acid, final test.

The elephant has a thick skin, a head full of ivory, and as everyone who has seen a circus parade knows, proceeds best by grasping the tail of his predecessor.

Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state.

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

Poets are not supposed to write epics any longer, despite the fact that the only poets who have endured and will endure are poets who have written epics.

The Poet, gentle creature as he is, / Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times; / His fits when he is neither sick nor well, / Though no distress be near him but his own / Unmanageable thoughts.

Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

Feeble verses are those which sin not against rules, but against genius.

Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep.

The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claw's all winter.

A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love.

The best poets, after all, exhibit only a tame and civil side of nature. They have not seen the west side of any mountain.

Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.

Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry.

Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet’s tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.

Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles:

Families, like countries, take their prophets unkindly, but a verse-speaker in the house is dishonor to be hooted.

Most wretched men / Are cradled into poetry by wrong. / They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.

Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

Ne’er / Was flattery lost on poet’s ear; / A simple race! they waste their toil / For the vain tribute of a smile.

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but] which the reader recognizes as his own.