"It may perhaps be said that it..." - Quote by Thomas Paine

“Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence.”

“He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.”

“It is unpleasant to see character throw itself away.”

“You do not understand even life. How can you understand death?”

“Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.”

“People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? 'Natural' death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful.”

“I grew up in a sad, depressed place. I got out. Poetry saved my life.”

“For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary.”

“Hustle is waking up the day before you die and realising you gave it your all.”