Ben Lerner Quotes
Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical - the human world of violence and difference - and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem… But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented, but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.
Ben Lerner
Quotes to Explore
The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder. This is not, you know, necessarily about, you know, whether you're a good person or not or whether you see black people, you know, on the street, and you're willing to shake their hands and be polite.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historical fiction.
Candace Camp
The history of philosophy is not, like the history of the sciences, to be studied with the intellect alone. That which is receptive in us and that which impinges upon us from history is the reality of man's being, unfolding itself in thought.
Karl Jaspers
Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?
Walt Whitman
The United States was the first country in the history of the world to be consciously created out of an idea - and the idea was liberty.
Nathaniel Branden
I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It's very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.
Salman Rushdie
White supremacy is a very, very popular and trenchant belief in this country's history and heritage.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I went to jail 44 times. I've been beaten and left for dead on the side of the road fighting for freedom... Yet Rosa Parks is better known in history than Ralph David Abernathy. Why is that?
Ralph Abernathy
History is more interesting than most people think.
Tansy Rayner Roberts
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Karl Marx
I think there's this essential human desire to have a unified field theory. Everyone is like, 'I want to unlock the single secret to 'Lost.' There isn't any one secret. There is not a unified field theory for 'Lost,' nor do we think there should be, because philosophically, we don't buy into that as a conceit.
Carlton Cuse
If I was going to make a broad generalisation, I'd say that I prefer the company of women. People know now that I live with Mike Figgis, but I prefer not to talk about it. On one level, privacy is important, but on another level I have no desire to deny certain things.
Saffron Burrows
If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.
Daniel Dennett
The answer is never violence. Rather, the answer, our answer, all our answer must be action. Calm, peaceful, collaborative and determined action.
Loretta Lynch
STG and the Ramshorn Theatre are a vital part of Glasgow's rich cultural history. To abandon them now is to abandon not only our past, but our future.
Peter Capaldi
In the United States businessmen often do not trust their colleagues. If you trust your colleague today, he may be your competitor tomorrow, because people frequently move from one company to another.
Akio Morita
When guys say at the press conference, 'I'm not scared' - now, for a guy to tell me he's not scared of me means that you are scared.
Bernard Hopkins
Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical - the human world of violence and difference - and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem… But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented, but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.
Ben Lerner
