Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes
We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
Quotes to Explore
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The single most powerful element of youth is our inability to know what's impossible.
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I was a big 'Battlestar Galactica' fan and 'Star Trek' fan. I grew up watching those.
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Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.
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The only thing that matters is what happens on the little hump out in the middle of the field.
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No one could ad lib like Peter. You would think that it was all scripted, he was so poetic, but it wasn't.
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In any work you do, you can be profound one minute, and then you be superficial the next, and you can be smart and insightful and then insipid. There can be room for all that.
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I like writing idealistically, romantically and swashbucklingly.
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It will be disastrous when a leader or manager shows up with one attitude one day and treats people with a different attitude the next day.
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The man who is intent on making the most of his opportunities is too busy to bother about luck.
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To Republicans, I humbly suggest that we make it possible for Democrats to give up their quest for redistribution of income and wealth by our acceptance of an appropriate role for government in financing those public goods and services necessary to secure a social safety net below which no American would be allowed to fall.
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I have a free voice. I have a free mind. I have freedom of expression.
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The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
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A filial son to his father can be a traitorous subject to his ruler.
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Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
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I don't know, the word 'famous' just sounds really weird to me, because I'm just me.
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I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.
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Lyndon Johnson, his 44-state landslide in 1964 and Great Society notwithstanding, was by 1968 a failed president being repudiated in the primaries of his own party.
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I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation, and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn't even have to mention them out loud to each other.
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I'm proud of the fact that I stood up early and unequivocally in opposition to Bush's foreign policy. That opposition hasn't changed.
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Why not just do something a little more on the gentle side?
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In my own constituency, the benefit cap has had the effect of social cleansing: of people receiving benefit, but the benefit is capped; therefore, they can't meet the rent levels charged and are forced to move. It's devastating for children, devastating for the family and very bad for the community as a whole.
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There is some big thing about the world that produced all these people willing to kill themselves just to hurt us. On 9/11 we learned we're part of that world, in the same completely crazy, drastic and arbitrary ways it hits other countries.
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A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.
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We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
