There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves but which they identify with from the interior.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric but of the quarrel with ourselves poetry.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being to which we rarely penetrate for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Perhaps it is because cats do not live by human patterns do not fit themselves into prescribed behavior that they are so united to creative people.

People who keep dogs are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves.

War is not the quintessential emergency in which man has to prove himself as my generation learned at its school desks in the days of the Kaiser rather peace is the emergency in which we all have to prove ourselves.

We can only move to a long-term resolution regarding terrorism and war by planting seeds of peace. We have to start with ourselves.

We have peace with God as soon as we believe but not always with ourselves. The pardon may be past the prince's hand and seal and yet not put into the prisoner's hand.

Let us not deceive ourselves we must elect world peace or world destruction.

Ultimately we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves more and more peace and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us the more peace there will be in our troubled world.

If we have not peace within ourselves it is in vain to seek it from outward sources.

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.

Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.

In every society in human history including the United States those in power seek to imbue themselves with the attributes of religion and patriotism as a way of getting greater support for their policy and insulating themselves from any criticism.

There are those who wrap themselves in flags and blow the tinny trumpet of patriotism as a means of fooling the people.

While not impossible it is especially challenging for teenage parents to develop bonds with their children. A high percent of them were themselves children of teenage parents and have never experienced appropriate parenting.

Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.

We can't blame children for occupying themselves with Facebook rather than playing in the mud. Our society doesn't put a priority on connecting with nature. In fact too often we tell them it's dirty and dangerous.

It's incredible how nature sets females up to take care of people and yet it is tricky for them to take care of themselves.

I did not want to be a tree a flower or a wave. In a dancer's body we as audience must see ourselves not the imitated behavior of everyday actions not the phenomenon of nature not exotic creatures from another planet but something of the miracle that is a human being.

We are a people that have always celebrated other people's success so long as we always had the opportunity to meet that success ourselves. That is the American nature. That is the American character. That is one of the things that makes us different from the rest of the world. And I'm afraid we could lose that or are on the verge of losing that.