"We love and we value peace; we..." - Quote by Thomas Jefferson

“I served with General Washington in die Legislature of Virginia...and...with Doctor Franklin in Congress. I never heard neither of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point.”

“The first object of human association [is] the full improvement of their condition.”

“War is not the best engine for us to resort to; nature has given us one in our commerce, which if properly managed, will be a better instrument for obliging the interested nations of Europe to treat us with justice.”

“Non-violence ... is the only thing that the atom bomb cannot destroy.”

“I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.”

“When you think everything is someone else's fault, you will suffer a lot. When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy.”

“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”

“The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.”

“That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.”