Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting but they have something missing in their natures there is a hole an empty place and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.

Why does it have to be politics? Is there a dynamism to that world and a theoretical capacity to do things that draws many talented people? Absolutely. Are there other ways to be involved and lead an interesting life? Of course.

The enemy is not just terrorism. It is the threat posed specifically by Islamist terrorism by Bin Ladin and others who draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within a minority strain of Islam that does not distinguish politics from religion and distorts both.

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

Conservative n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.

I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.

I used to write sonnets and various things and moved from there into writing prose which incidentally is a lot more interesting than poetry including the rhythms of prose.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats almost 100 years old now and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

I try not to wear anything I have to fidget with - there's nothing worse than wearing something and pulling down the hem and re-adjusting the top. My pet hate is when girls wear those strapless dresses and spend the whole night yanking them up.

My third appeal is to my fellow citizens in all countries: Help us to establish lasting peace in the world.

The popular and one may say naive idea is that peace can be secured by disarmament and that disarmament must therefore precede the attainment of absolute security and lasting peace.

Modern society based as it is on the division of labor can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.

Mankind will never win lasting peace so long as men use their full resources only in tasks of war. While we are yet at peace let us mobilize the potentialities particularly the moral and spiritual potentialities which we usually reserve for war.

I've always had questions about what it meant to be a protester to be in the minority. Are the people who are trying to find peace who are trying to have the Constitution apply to everybody are they really the radicals? We're not protesting from the outside. We're inside.