
“Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.”
Source: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
Governor Generals Award for Poetry, Nov. 1999.
Other
“Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.”
Source: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
Source: A Monk in the World: Cultivating a Spiritual Life (2003), p. 8
“Our span of life is brief, but is long enough for us to live well and honestly.”
"The Obscurity of the Poet", p. 15
Poetry and the Age (1953)
1990s, Long Walk to Freedom (1995)
Context: It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.
This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins...
Clement Greenberg, Robert C. Morgan in: Clement Greenberg, Late Writings in Detached Observations http://books.google.co.in/books?id=8wFNAAAAYAAJ, University of Minnesota Press, 30 January 2007, p. 70
“We are more than our base desires, and our lives are not sustained by gratifying them.”
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)
Quote of 1927, on The Artstory: 'Sophie Taeuber-Arp http://www.theartstory.org/artist-taeuber-arp-sophie.htm, Swiss Multi-media, applied arts, performance artist, and textile designer'
Source: I.D. Magazine Interview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.D._(magazine)