Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
He
Jeremiah is a most melancholy prophet. He wails from beginning to end; he is often childish, is rarely indecent, and although it may be blasphemy to say so, he and his ‘Lamentations’ are really not worth reading.
But maybe it’s up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it’s never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.
Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.
He who says o’er much I love not is in love.
Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude – his monologue is a universal chorus.
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.
Herbert Hoover was a man of genuine, fine character, but he lacked practical political sense. And he couldn’t bend and shift and change with the requirements of the time. And he was a ruined President, because he was such a, I think, stiff-backed ideologue. And I think that speaks volumes about his character.
We must have constantly present in our minds the difference between independence and liberty. Liberty is a right of doing whatever the laws permit, and if a citizen could do what they forbid he would no longer be possessed of liberty.
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.