“A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.”

Funeral in Berlin (1964; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) pp. 144-5
Described there as a joke current in 1960s Czechoslovakia

Source: Unless You Become Like This Child

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

#126
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

"Pietà"
Poems New and Collected (1998), No End of Fun (1967)

Hansard, House of Commons 5th series, vol. 381, col. 540.
Speech in the House of Commons, 2 July 1942.
1940s

“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 134; conclusion
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Context: How necessary it is to think of the poet as somebody who has prepared himself to be visited by a dæmon, as a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems happen — for otherwise we expect him to go on writing good poems, better poems, and this is the one thing you cannot expect even of good poets, much less of anybody else. Good painters in their sixties may produce good pictures as regularly as an orchard produces apples; but Planck is a great scientist because he made one discovery as a young man — and I can remember reading in a mathematician’s memoirs a sentence composedly recognizing the fact that, since the writer was now past forty, he was unlikely ever again to do any important creative work in mathematics. A man who is a good poet at forty may turn out to be a good poet at sixty; but he is more likely to have stopped writing poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.

Remarks at Chicago's O'Hare Airport (September 21, 2001) http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010927-1.html
2000s, 2001

Reported in Newsweek (January 23, 1978), p. 23.