Journalists From The United States

"I would say, we can't allow ourselves to be frightened into not living our lives, and I think that we have to keep going and we have to keep going with the faith that thing will get better … And things will get better when we make them better."

"I feel like my soul is aching for the country. … There's not a day that goes by where I'm not putting on my shoes, or brushing my teeth, where I just think about the ordinariness of, people who just went to a concert, or the ordinariness of the day from people from 9/11, who were just doing an ordinary thing, and then you never get home. … So, I would say that these days of crisis and tragedy are to remind us all to be present in the ordinariness of our lives, that actually turns out to be extraordinary, when the person you love doesn't come home at night. I pay attention to things, you know? … This is to make us all more awakened about our own life, and the fact that it shows up this way is a horror. But, as I heard someone say, seeing people coming together, helping each other — whether it's this crisis we're in or what we saw weeks ago in, in Houston, in Florida, and now in Puerto Rico — it shows the humanity of us all. So, it's an opportunity to show the best of ourselves, when the worst shows up."

"Well, I don't call you an atheist then. I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder and the mystery, then that is what God is. That is what God is, not the bearded guy in the sky."

"I won't say goodbye, I'll just say until we meet again. To God be the glory."

"People often ask me: "What is the secret to the success of the show?" "How it lasted 25 years?" I none jokingly say: "My team and Jesus", because nothing but the Hand of God has made this possible for me. For all of you who get railed up when I mentioned God and you wanna know which God am I talking about, I am talking about the same one you talk about, I am talking about the Alpha and Omega, the Omniscience, the Unprecedented, the Ultimate Consciousness, the Source, the Force, the all of everything that is, The One and Only G-O-D, that's what I am talking about..."

"All the energy that you spend, trying to hurt somebody else, that energy will turn around and slap you in the face. The same thing is true, Love, what I know is that the energy that put out everyday with the best of intentions that it would reach you where you really live in heart of yourself has come back to me from all of you in full force. So that what we've learnt on this show; You are responsible for your life and when you get that, everything changes, my friends. So don't wait for somebody else to fix you, to save you or complete you..."

"You want motivation? You still don't understand what our children are up against? Let me read you something that was posted on our message boards from someone who claims to be a member of a known pedophile network. He said this: he doesn't forgive, he does not forget, his group has over nine thousand penises and they're all raping children. So, I want you to know: they're organized, and they have systematic ways of hurting children and they use the internet to do it. These are the predators that are molesting and raping our children. They're trading the photos and videos online, and I want to stress again: this is not about politics, it's about giving the dedicated men and women of law enforcement who are trying to catch these predators the resources they need."

"I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear."

"I will continue to use my voice. I believed from the beginning that [the lawsuit] was an attempt to muzzle my voice, and I come from a people who have struggled and died in order to have a voice in this country. And I refused to be muzzled."

"My reaction is that free speech not only lives, it rocks!"

"I've been stopped cold from eating another burger!"

"What other people label or might try to call failure, I have learned is just God's way of pointing you in a new direction."

"I think that, uh, you know, I'm really happy that the message, or at least some of the message of The Secret is reaching mass consciousness in a way that people realize that they can begin to, uh, positively affect their lives. That's why when I was on the show and said "I've lived this way my whole life", and people who watched our show for years know that I've been talking about how you take responsibility for your life and the choices that you make. Empower your life. And so, when I say that, you know, um, that's how I live my life, the message of The Secret, that's what I mean. I also believe, that, uh, medical healing or healing comes in lots of forms. You know that adage about the guy being lost and God sent him a boat and God sent him — then he gets to heaven and says "Why didn't you help me?" And God's, "I sent you the boat, fool!" So, that's the way I look at medical healing."

"What I learned at a very early age was that I was responsible for my life. And as I became more spiritually conscious, I learned that we all are responsible for ourselves, that you create your own reality by the way you think and therefore act. You cannot blame apartheid, your parents, your circumstances, because you are not your circumstances. You are your possibilities. If you know that, you can do anything."

"I understand why people think we're gay. There isn't a definition in our culture for this kind of bond between women. So I get why people have to label it – how can you be this close without it being sexual?"

"It felt like a new day."

"I never think about what I want. It's about what you want to give to other people."

"I'm still off hamburgers."

"The American states have gone far in assisting the progress of truth; but they have stopped short of perfection. They ought to have given every honest citizen an equal right to enjoy his religion and an equal title to all civil emoluments, without obliging him to tell his religion. Every interference of the civil power in regulating opinion, is an impious attempt to take the business of the Deity out of his own hands; and every preference given to any religious denomination, is so far slavery and bigotry."

"There iz no alternativ. Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds, stil exists in full force; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it wil proov that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ancestors."

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive."

"I like the freedom that Walt Whitman was using to play with and shape the American language. Especially in writing Tripmaster Monkey-I just lifted lines from Leaves of Grass. You would think they were modern Sixties' slang-"Trippers and Askers" and "Linguists and Contenders Surround Me"-all of that-"Song of the Open Road," "Song of Occupations"-I just took those for title headings for my book. I like the rhythm of his language and the freedom and the wildness of it. It's so American. And also his vision of a new kind of human being that was going to be formed in this country-although he never specifically said Chinese-ethnic Chinese also I'd like to think he meant all kinds of people. And also I love that throughout Leaves of Grass he always says "men and women," "male and female." He's so different from other writers of his time, and even of this time. Even a hundred years ago he always included women and he always used [those phrases], "men and women," "male and female.""

"When I read the poetry of Walt Whitman, I could understand why he answered the question, “Do I contradict myself?" with "Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.""

"With Whitman, the exhilarations are specifically aimed at the pioneer; I don't see any obstructions. I don't see the Indians coming in the opposite direction. I don't see Indian massacres. I don't see brutalities, scalpings, and burning and torturing. It's a sanitized version of infinite wheat fields. I think a great poet has a deeper sense of evil, a wickedness of malice and malignity."

"I would think Walt Whitman probably had more influence on my whole poetic thinking than anybody, but I never dreamed of trying to write in the Whitman manner."

"Whitman to me is the most fascinating of American poets. Whitman started to write the great poetry from scratch after he had written all that junk for newspapers, the sentimental lyrical poems. All of a sudden he wrote Leaves of Grass. When I was teaching at the University of Nebraska, my friend James Miller was chairman of the English Department. He wrote the first book attempting to make a parallel between the structure of Leaves of Grass and the steps of the mystical experience as in St. John of the Cross. I was completely bowled over by this, not having been able to explain how Whitman came to write “Song of Myself,” which is unlike anything not only in American literature, but unique in all the world. The parallels to it are mystical literature. Miller tried to show that there was actual evidence for this kind of experience, which evidently happens at a particular moment in someone's life. ... When I saw the negative reaction to Whitman with the great ruling critics of the time, I couldn't believe it. Eliot never really gave up hammering away on Whitman, neither did Pound. Although Pound makes little concessions. Whitman, you know, didn't have any influence in this country until Allen Ginsberg came along."

"Whitman is a "bad influence"; that is, he cannot be imitated."

"Whitman’s masterpiece, his whole vision, is exactly about this: life as a quest for truth, love, beauty, goodness, and freedom; life as the art of becoming human through the cultivation of the human soul."

"I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman — I have detested you long enough."

"I read a lot. In poetry, I liked W. H. Auden more than anyone. I loved British writers and the novels I grew up with, Twain, Dickens, and so on. I was not influenced say by Walt Whitman or anyone like that. His freedom was not my freedom, and so it didn’t affect me."

"When Whitman in Song of Myself wrote "Camerado, this is no book. Who touches this touches a man, and "What I assume you shall assume," he articulated an abiding impulse latent within all poetry. The women's poetry movement today is a carrier of that same impulse and makes it possible for us to "assume" more than we did before."

"Anyone can visit Walt Whitman's birthing corner on/Long Island./The guide points and says, There, right there, he was/born./Some visitors can't move on quickly/to the next room./They are hypnotized./What if Walt had never left this corner or stepped out/into the streets/to do and say all he did?/Then who would we be?"

"Walt was always working on the same book/First edition did not/have his name on cover/He reviewed himself in newspapers anonymously/quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson/without permission/on the spine/Emerson was not thrilled/Take a breath/Full breath/That's what I call a poet"

"Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine; Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace, And copies Ovid's filth without his grace. In his rough brain a genius might have grown, Had he not sought to play the brute alone; But void of shame, he let his wit run wild, And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child. Averse to culture, strange to humankind, He never knew the pleasures of the mind. Scorning the pure, the delicate, the clean, His joys were sordid, and his morals mean. Thro' his gross thoughts a native vigour ran, From which he deem'd himself the perfect man: But want of decency his rank decreas'd, And sunk him to the level of the beast. Would that his Muse had dy'd before her birth, Nor spread such foul corruption o'er the earth."

"I felt some really exciting things were happening with the language in the Sixties because people were finding that vocabulary for psychedelic states or visions or social action. But as I was working with that language, I saw too how it had its roots a hundred years ago in Whitman. So if it goes back a hundred years to Whitman, then it goes back thirty more to Poe. I feel very much in that tradition, showing people how 1960 was using language of the 1860s. Because we don't remember. Walt Whitman said, "Look to the East, that's also your motherland." He already had that idea that our myths are not just from Europe, but from Asia. So I'm saying, "Look at Asia," because we already know that we come from Europe. For a long time when we say classical, we meant Greek and Roman. And I'm saying, "Look, there's more classics, more.""

"I mean to carry on in the tradition of Walt Whitman. Whitman says, "I sing the body electric" and "I sing the body from top to toe." He writes about his goal of celebrating the modern man as he calls it, and he sings the American self."

"I know the formal element in Walt Whitman's poetry found and enormous echo throughout the world. Yet Walt Whitman's significance lies elsewhere. He combined the contemplation of nature and of civilization which are apparently either contradictory, into a single intoxicating vision of life, because he always had sight of the transitoriness of all phenomena. He said: "Living is the little that is left over from dying." so he gave his whole heart to every leaf of grass. I admire in him the reconciliation of art and nature. When the war between the Northern and Southern States in America, which first really set in motion the power of our present machine world, first broke out, Walt Whitman became a medical orderly. He did what all of us ought to do, particularly today. He helped the weak, the sick and the defeated. He was a Christian and–with a close affinity to us Jews–he was therefore an important measure of the status and worth of humanity."

"Walt Whitman; I love his poetry."

"One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world."

"I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession."

"I had started reading Marx and Lenin, but at that point I think Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau had more effect on me. What I responded to in my readings were emotional rather than theoretical questions. I was developing a hatred of the brutality of the existing economic system, a hatred of the impersonal degradation of human beings. That's what moved me as a teenager, and stayed with me."

"The whole world has given heroic figures to humanity, who in the face of persecution and obloquy have lived and fought for their right and the right of mankind to free and unstinted expression. America has the distinction of having contributed a large quota of native-born children who have most assuredly not lagged behind. Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Voltairine de Cleyre...Moses Harman...Horace Traubel...and quite an array of other brave souls have expressed themselves in keeping with their vision of a new social order based on freedom from every form of coercion. True, the price they had to pay was high. They were deprived of most of the comforts society offers to ability and talent, but denies when they will not be subservient. But whatever the price, their lives were enriched beyond the common lot."

"I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "LEAVES OF GRASS." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging..."

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists. Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it. Whitman, a supporter, was also enamored of the violent Indian- and Mexican-killing Texas Rangers. Whitman saw the war as bolstering US self-respect and believed that a "true American" would be unable to resist "this pride in our victorious armies.""

"The populist poet of Jacksonian democracy, Walt Whitman, sang the song of manhood and the Anglo-American super race that had been steeled through empire. As an enthusiastic supporter of the US war against Mexico in 1846, Whitman proposed the stationing of sixty thousand US troops in Mexico in order to establish a regime change there "whose efficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed by the United States. This will bring out enterprise, open the way for manufacturers and commerce, into which the immense dead capital of the country [Mexico] will find its way."2 Whitman explicitly grounded this prescription in racism: "The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history.... A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out." The whole world would benefit from US expansion: "We pant to see our country and its rule far-reaching. What has miserable, inefficient Mexico... to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?" In September 1846, when General Zachary Taylor's troops captured Monterrey, Whitman hailed it as "another clinching proof of the indomitable energy of the Anglo-Saxon character" Whitman's sentiments reflected the established US origin myth that had the frontier settlers replacing the Native peoples as historical destiny, adding his own theoretical twist of what would later be called social Darwinism."

"Whitman...a man full-blooded and brotherly, unselfconscious in his democracy and genuinely at ease with all kinds and classes."

"the contributions of people whom we may now identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender are integral and central to how we conceptualize our national history. Without the work of social activists, thinkers, writers, and artists such as We'Wha, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Martha "Calamity" Jane Cannary Burke, Edith Guerrier, Countee Cullen, Ethel Waters, Bayard Rustin, Roy Cohn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cherrie Moraga, and Lily Tomlin, we would not have the country that we have today."

"Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both—as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man."

"When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, 'The leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself."

"I rank Muriel Rukeyser with Walt Whitman, the essential American poet, democratic at the level of hope."