“We have confused the free with the free and easy.”

—  Adlai Stevenson

Putting First Things (1960)

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Adlai Stevenson131
mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the… 1900–1965

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I who am lost and damned with words,
Whose words are a business and an art,
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However much I have blotted our
Waking love, its memory is still
there. And I know the web, the net,
The blind and crippled bird. For then, for
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