Robert Pinsky quote: “The poet is a particular kind of expert.”

“The advice to any young poet is to embrace your freedom and not feel constrained to write in one particular way or only about one particular topic. If they’re Latino poets, I would encourage them not only to read widely, but also to read Latino poetry, to familiarize themselves with their particular tradition within American literature…”

Francisco Aragón (1968) poet

On his advice to Latino poets in “Interview with Francisco Aragón: Latino Poetry From All Its Perspectives” https://www.sampsoniaway.org/literary-voices/2010/09/16/interview-with-francisco-aragon-latino-poetry-from-all-its-perspectives/ in Sampsonia Way (2010 Sept 16)

“Like it or not, we have placed our destiny in the hands of the experts. A politician is, after all, a kind of expert, if self-styled. Even the fact that competent experts must serve under politicians of mediocre intelligence and little foresight is a problem that we are stuck with, because the experts themselves cannot agree on any major world issue.”

Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) Polish science fiction author

One Human Minute (1986)
Context: The book does not contain “everything about the human being,” because that is impossible. The largest libraries in the world do not contain “everything.” The quantity of anthropological data discovered by scientists now exceeds any individual’s ability to assimilate it. The division of labor, including intellectual labor, begun thirty thousand years ago in the Paleolithic, has become an irreversible phenomenon, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Like it or not, we have placed our destiny in the hands of the experts. A politician is, after all, a kind of expert, if self-styled. Even the fact that competent experts must serve under politicians of mediocre intelligence and little foresight is a problem that we are stuck with, because the experts themselves cannot agree on any major world issue. A logocracy of quarreling experts might be no better than the rule of the mediocrities to which we are subject. The declining intellectual quality of political leadership is the result of the growing complexity of the world. Since no one, be he endowed with the highest wisdom, can grasp it in its entirety, it is those who are least bothered by this who strive for power.

“A poet of my kind
Skates on the thinnest ice.”

Edward Lucie-Smith (1933) British art critic, writer and curator

Poem Postcard

“It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.”

William Congreve The Double Dealer

Epistle dedicatory
The Double Dealer (1694)

“The new fire is laid, but the particular kind of match is missing.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Vision of the Future Through Eyes of Science, News of the World, 31 October 1937
Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol IV, Churchill at Large, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 414.
The 1930s
Context: Three hundred years ago it would have seemed absurd to say that this black mineral, this sea-coal, which could be used as a substitute for wood to burn in one's grate, could be applied to revolutionize human affairs. Today we know that there is another source of energy a million times greater. We have not yet learned how to harness it or apply it, but it is there. Occasionally in complicated processes in the laboratory a scientist observes transmutations, re-arrangements in the core of the atom, which is known as the nucleus, which generate power at a rate hundreds of thousands of times greater than is produced when coal is burned and when, as the scientists put it, a carbon atom satisfied its affinity for an oxygen molecule. It can scarcely be doubted that a way to induce and control these effects can be found. The new fire is laid, but the particular kind of match is missing.

“The innovator, however, must in the first place be discontented, he must doubt the value of what he is doing or question the accepted ways of doing it. And secondly, he must be prepared to take fresh paths, to venture into fields where he is by no means expert. This is true, at least, of major forms of innovation; they make it possible for other men to be expert, but are not themselves forms of expertise. Freud was not an expert psycho-analyst; before Freud wrote there was no such thing; he created the standards by which psycho-analysts are judged expert. Neither was Marx an expert in interpreting history in economic terms nor Darwin an expert in evolutionary biology. If a man is trained, purely and simply, to be expert and contented in a particular task he will not innovate; Freud would have remained an anatomist, Marx a philosopher, Darwin a field-naturalist.”

John Passmore (1914–2004) Australian philosopher

Source: The Perfectibility of Man (1971), p. 282.

“It is not my purpose as a poet to condemn war (or to be exact, modern warfare). I only wish to present the universal aspects of a particular event”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Note appended to his poem The End of War (1933)
Literary Quotes

“Feeling this way was a particular kind of horror, having the emotions without the memories.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Welcome to Shadowhunter Academy

“For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.”

Jasper Fforde book One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

Source: One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

“In sports, you learn competition means go after it, win it. And not to let anything else interfere. It's something you learn, and it sticks with you. I consider myself an expert in looking into a particular idea or goal and then going after it without anything else in mind… It's always the same kind of thing. You pick a goal, and then you just go after it, accomplish it, and get satisfaction out of that.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

From Cowboys & Indians, the "magazine of the west" (September 2004).
When asked if big-screen success could bring him as much satisfaction as body-building victories
2000s

“The poet is a particular kind of expert.”

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