Harvard University Alumni

"Who are we? We are the life force power of the universe."

"Time softly there Laughs through the abyss of radiance with the gods."

"Hark, below, the many-voiced earth, The chanting of the old religious trees, Rustle of far-off waters, woven sounds Of small and multitudinous lives awake, Peopling the grasses and the pools with joy, Uttering their meaning to the mystic night!"

"Bring me your children hither. … Unto this twain, man-child and womanchild, I give the passion of this element; This seed of longing, substance of this love; This power, this purity, this annihilation. Let their hands light the altar of the world. 'T is yours forever. I have brought it home!"

"The gods despise enforcèd offerings. When the heart brings its dearest and its last Then only will they hear—if then, if then!"

"Passion is power, And, kindly tempered, saves. All things declare Struggle hath deeper peace than sleep can bring."

"Wilson was a visionary who liked to identify himself with "forward-looking man"; Harding … was as old-fashioned as those wooden Indians which used to stand in front of cigar stores.... Wilson thought in terms of the whole world; Harding was for America first. And, finally, whereas Wilson wanted America to exert itself nobly, Harding wanted to give it a rest."

"It is easier to tear down a code than to put a new one in its place."

"By the end of the war ... social compulsion had become a national habit. The typical American had never had more than a half-hearted enthusiasm for the rights of the minority; he had been accustomed to set his community in order by the first means that came to hand - a sumptuary law, a vigilance committee, or if necessary a shotgun. Declarations of Independence and Bills of Rights were all very well in the history books, but when he was running things himself he had usually been open to the suggestion that liberty was another name for license and that the Bill of Rights was the last resort of scoundrels. During the war he had discovered how easy it was to legislate and propagandize and intimidate his neighbors into what seemed to him acceptable conduct, and after peace was declared he went on using the same sort of methods to see that they continued to conform ... He thought he knew how people ought to behave, and he would stand for no nonsense."

"I shall have more to say when I am dead."

"Another poem that I loved first as music, later pondered for what it could tell me about women and men and marriage, was Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Eros Turannos":"

"We are young And we are friends of time."

"The gods are growing old; The stars are singing Golden hair to gray Green leaf to yellow leaf,—or chlorophyl To xanthophyl, to be more scientific."

"You have made The cement of your churches out of tears And ashes, and the fabric will not stand."

"He was himself and he had lost the speed He started with, and he was left behind."

"Are we no greater than the noise we make Along one blind atomic pilgrimage Whereon by crass chance billeted we go Because our brains and bones and cartilage Will have it so?"

"A thousand golden sheaves were lying there, Shining and still, but not for long to stay— As if a thousand girls with golden hair Might rise from where they slept and go away."

"Your Dollar is your only Word, The wrath of it your only fear. You build it altars tall enough To make you see, but your are blind; You cannot leave it long enough To look before you or behind."

"Whenever Richard Cory went down town,We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown,Clean favored, and imperially slim.And he was always quietly arrayed,And he was always human when he talked;But still he fluttered pulses when he said,"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.And he was rich—yes, richer than a king— And admirably schooled in every grace:In fine, we thought that he was everythingTo make us wish that we were in his place.So on we worked, and waited for the light,And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,Went home and put a bullet through his head."

"Oh for a poet - for a beacon bright"

"No matter what we are, and what we sing, Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel"

"The IDF is properly considered one of the best armies in the world: innovative, creative, and skilled. It is so because it can draw upon all of its country's most talented and capable citizens, which is the great benefit of a legitimate system of universal conscription and prolonged reserve service."

"Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment."

"I figured out that my passion is not really for music. My passion is actually for people. So the exploration into different musics of different times has to do with trying to figure out who these people are, what this music represents and what context do we want to give it and what does it mean to us right now."

"We were violating the law, lobbying from the executive branch."

"I have not been convicted of anything."

"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially. [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

"The House is composed of very good men, not shining, but honest and reasonably well-informed, and in time they will be found to improve, and not to be much inferior in eloquence, science, and dignity, to the British Commons. They are patriotic enough, and I believe there are more stupid (as well as more shining) people in the latter, in proportion."

"Liberty has never yet lasted long in a democracy; nor has it ever ended in any thing better than despotism."

"The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness, which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be, liberty."

"I consider biennial elections as a security that the sober, second thought of the people shall be law."

"The gentleman puts me in mind of an old hen which persists in setting after her eggs are taken away."

"Madison has inserted in his amendments the increase of representatives, each State having two at least. The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people. Freedom of the press too. There is a prodigious great dose for a medicine. But it will stimulate the stomach as little as hasty pudding. It is rather food for physic. An immense mass of sweet and other herbs and roots for diet drink."

"[The framers of the Constitution] “intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism.”"

"“But differ greatly in the sequel.” --Fisher Ames, when confronted with the declaration that all men are created equal"

"Fisher Ames expressed the popular security more wisely, when he compared a monarchy and a republic, saying, "that a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are always in water.""

"It was said by Fisher Ames that “falsehood proceeds from Maine to Georgia, while truth is pulling on his boots”."

"Why then, if these books for children must be retained, as they will be, should not the bible regain the place it once held as a school book ? Its morals are pure, its examples captivating and noble. The reverence for the sacred book, that is thus early impressed, lasts long; and, probably, if not impressed in infancy, never takes firm hold of the mind."

"The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people. Freedom of the press, too."

"Formulae are the anaesthetics of thought, not its stimulants and to make any one think is far better worth while than cramming him with ill-considered, and therefore indigestible, learning."

"In the great desert of northern Arizona the traveller, threading his way across a sage-brush and cacti plain shut in by abrupt-sided shelves of land rising here and there some hundreds of feet higher, suddenly comes upon a petrified forest."

"So far as thought may peer into the past, the epic of our solar system began with a great catastrophe. Two suns met. What had been, ceased; what was to be, arose. Fatal to both progenitors, the event dated a stupendous cosmic birth."

"War is a survival among us from savage times and affects now chiefly the boyish and unthinking element of the nation. The wisest realize that there are better ways for practicing heroism and other and more certain ends of insuring the survival of the fittest. It is something a people outgrow. But whether they consciously practice peace or not, nature in its evolution eventually practices it for them, and after enough of the inhabitants of a globe have killed each other off, the remainder must find it more advantageous to work together for the common good."

"That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort or other we may consider as certain as it is uncertain what these beings may be."

"The whole object of science is to synthesize, and so simplify; and did we but know the uttermost of a subject we could make it singularly clear."

"Are physical forces alone at work there, or has evolution begotten something more complex, something not unakin to what we know on Earth as life?"

"And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene, The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled, Will turn its private substance into green, And young shoots spread upon our inner world."

"The light comes brighter from the east; the caw Of restive crows is sharper on the ear."

"Yet for this we travelled With hope, and not alone, In the country of ourselves, In a country of bright stone."

"You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is."