40 quotes
Drum on your drums, batter on your banjos,
sob on the long cool winding saxophones.
Go to it, O jazzmen.
Jazz Fantasia (1920)
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over the harbor and city
on silent haunches, and then moves on.
Fog (1916)
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold.
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds.
I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.
Chicago (1916)
Yesterday is done. Tomorrow never comes. Today is here. If you don't know what to do, sit still and listen.
Incidentals (1904)
Tell me if the lovers are losers... tell me if any get more than the lovers.
Cool Tombs (1918)
I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory except the face of the woman on the American silver dollar.
I ask you to come through and show me where you're pouring out the blood of your life.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can't be bought.
The People Will Live On (1936)
If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby.
Remembrance Rock (1948)
The people know the salt of the sea
and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth.
The people take the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
Look out how you use proud words.
When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back.
They wear long boots, hard boots.
Primer Lessons (1922)
Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
Prayers of Steel (1920)
When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into
the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and
the assassin... in the dust, in the cool tombs.
Cool Tombs (1918)
The United States is, not are. The Civil War was fought over a verb. Orval Faubus don't know that. But he gonna know, he gonna know.
Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
Under the Harvest Moon (1916)
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
** *
I am the grass.
Let me work.
I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us, I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision …
The greatest cunning is to have none at all.
Misattributed
The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something.
Disputed