It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man.

And in this respect the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a tragedy a clash between one very powerful very convincing very painful claim over this land and another no less powerful no less convincing claim.

The only ground on which a neutral State can claim respect at the hands of belligerents is that so far as she is concerned their rights are protected.

There are so many things to think about when you make an album. Like who am I trying to impress? Am I going to get respect critical acclaim? Or am I going to sell lots of records?

The advent of a new religion making serious and impressive claims to embody a new revelation from on high is not a frequent occurrence.

Nations are equal in respect to each other and entitled to claim equal consideration for their rights whatever may be their relative dimensions or strength or however greatly they may differ in government religion or manners.

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer but art is very self-referential whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

Cruel persecutions and intolerance are not accidents but grow out of the very essence of religion namely its absolute claims.

It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations.

Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion.

I say the law should be blind to race gender and sexual orientation just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind except for children the severely disabled and the elderly whose physical frailty demands society's care.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry I can do that.

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

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.

While you are proclaiming peace with your lips be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.

Obama has been attacked repeatedly for not wearing a flag pin with Republicans claiming that his patriotism is in question. It's all a bit silly.

I am not going to claim that modern anarchism has any direct relation to Roman jurisprudence but I do claim that it has its basis in the laws of nature rather than in the state of nature.

There are a lot of bands who claim to be punk and they only play the music they have no clue what it's all about. It's a lifestyle. It's not about popularity and all that crap.

There is a one woman in China that claimed she paid $50 to get my e-mail address. It was pretty shocking. I got one this morning from Scotland. A girl's requesting a signed photo of me.

One argument goes that recessions are good for female artists because when money flies out the window women are allowed in the house. The other claims that when money ebbs so do prospects for women.

Mom claimed that I could carry a tune at 2 or 3 years of age. Maybe she was a little prejudiced.

Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.

I've only slept with men I've been married to. How many women can make that claim?

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects because men are equally free they claim to be absolutely equal.