What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.

To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now they are truly brothers.

Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spiritthe records of men’s watch upon the world and on themselves.

Piety’s hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man’s piety stinks. It’s insufferable.

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard – by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off.

What once was cuddled must learn to kiss, The cold worm’s mouth. That’s all the mystery.

You wanted justice and there was none- only love.

The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man’s face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.

The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it’s author’s explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author’s explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.