Stephen Vincent Benét

“Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.”

“Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.”

“Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth.”

“You can't eat the Constitution.”

“American muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land.”

“It is not a freedom from but a freedom to.”

“And some things died that should have lived, and some things lived that should have died.”

“We are the people, our parents and grandparents, our children, and our children's children. We are the ones who will have to pay for what is being done, and we are the ones who will have to live with it.”

“I have fallen in love with American names, The sharp names that never get fat, The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.”

“We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.”

“Books are not dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are.”

“Grant stood by the forecastle, a cigar in his mouth, a rather shabby, middle-aged man who had been a failure all his life.”