Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

There was a while when I was feeling like, ‚Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this‘.

Do not let circumstances control you. You change your circumstances.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.

We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant’s revolution, but one of the extreme Right.

I don’t have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I’m left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We, of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

I could talk all day, T stands for talking, T stands for tender, T stands for things that don’t even rhyme with T.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.

During the 60’s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases – or ever has released at any moment in History – a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day – and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.

I hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse. So for me, it’s a great thing to be able to scream and say whatever I want.

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

I don’t know who invented high heels, but all women owe him a lot.

The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is ‚elephant‘.

I hate the idea of genres.

I don’t know the law, the kind of law of quantity and quality, but I think the opportunity of people being able to express themselves and to have the means of production is a great thing. It’s also changing how we’re telling stories.

I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

‚Nation‘ was one that I’d have killed myself if I hadn’t written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated – Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!

No boxer in the history of boxing has had Parkinson’s. There’s no injury in my brain that suggests that the illness came from boxing.

The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

There are really two core principles at play here. There’s giving people a voice so that people can express their opinions. Then, there’s keeping the community safe, which I think is really important. We’re not gonna let people plan violence or attack each other or do bad things.

My age is very insignificant to me. I don’t think about it, but the world does. The world likes young people in general.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

I’d read up on the history of our country and I’d become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000 mph.

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.