The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect not a pleasurable memory of itself but an immediate constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

As this long and difficult war ends I would like to address a few special words to the American people: Your steadfastness in supporting our insistence on peace with honor has made peace with honor possible.

There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made between patriotism which is attachment to a way of life and nationalism which is the insistence that your way of life deserves to rule over other ways of life.

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.

If anything characterizes the cultural life of the seventies in America it is an insistence on preventing failures of communication.

In passing we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.