“Quantum physicists today are reconciled to randomness at the individual event level, but to expect causality to underlie statistical quantum phenomena is reasonable. Suppose a person shakes an ink pen such that ink spots are formed on a white wall, in what appears for all intents and purposes, randomly. Let us further suppose the random ink spots accumulate to form precise pictures of different known persons' faces every time. We will not regard the overall result to be a happenchance; we are apt to suspect there must be a "method" to the person who is shaking the ink pen.”

My Address, written in Military Prisons of Bogiati, 5 June 1971 – After beating.
Poetry, Vi scrivo da un carcere in Grecia (I write you from a prison in Greece) (1974)

As quoted in Al-Jaami' al-Saghîr by Imam al-Suyuti, where it is declared a "weak Hadith".
Variant translations:
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.
The Islamic Review, Vol. 22 (1934), p. 105, edited by Khwajah Kamal al-Din
The ink of scholars will be weighed in the scale with the blood of martyrs.
As quoted in Knowledge of God in Classical Sufism: Foundations of Islamic Mystical Theology (2004) by John Renard
Sunni Hadith

Lyrics, S.C.I.E.N.C.E. (1997)

Vague Thoughts On Art (1911)
Context: He is but a poor philosopher who holds a view so narrow as to exclude forms not to his personal taste. No realist can love romantic Art so much as he loves his own, but when that Art fulfils the laws of its peculiar being, if he would be no blind partisan, he must admit it. The romanticist will never be amused by realism, but let him not for that reason be so parochial as to think that realism, when it achieves vitality, is not Art. For what is Art but the perfected expression of self in contact with the world; and whether that self be of enlightening, or of fairy-telling temperament, is of no moment whatsoever. The tossing of abuse from realist to romanticist and back is but the sword-play of two one-eyed men with their blind side turned toward each other. Shall not each attempt be judged on its own merits? If found not shoddy, faked, or forced, but true to itself, true to its conceiving mood, and fair-proportioned part to whole; so that it lives — then, realistic or romantic, in the name of Fairness let it pass! Of all kinds of human energy, Art is surely the most free, the least parochial; and demands of us an essential tolerance of all its forms. Shall we waste breath and ink in condemnation of artists, because their temperaments are not our own?

Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

Source: Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012, 2nd ed. 2015), Ch. 3: General Principles of Quantum Mechanics

Source: Bend Sinister

What It Means to Be a Poet in America (1926)
Context: Whenever I begin to write a poem or draw a picture I am, in imagination, if not in reality, back in my room where I began to draw pen-and-ink pictures and write verses in my seventeenth year. Both windows of the room look down on the great Governor’s Yard of Illinois. This yard is a square block, a beautiful park. Our house is on so high a hill I can always look down upon the governor. Among my very earliest memories are those of seeing old Governor Oglesby leaning on his cane, marching about, calling his children about him.