18 quotes
Who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall.
HOWL (1955)
Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Howl (1956)
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
The war is language,
language abused
for Advertisement,
language used
like magic for power on the planet.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America (1956)
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
America (1956)
Whoever controls the media — the images — controls the culture.
Brain Power : Learn to Improve Your Thinking Skills (1980)
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America (1956)
Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose.
Glen Burns (1983)
I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view.
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists
Howl (1956)
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
America (1956)
The CIA and the Mafia are in cahoots
Hadda be Playin' on a Jukebox (1975)
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. By poetry I mean the imagining of what has been lost and what can be found—the imagining of who we are and the slow realization of it.
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night.
Howl (1956)
America, Sacco & Vanzetti must not die.
America (1956)
You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism.
1. You can't win. 2. You can't break even. 3. You can't even get out of the game.
Misattributed