Quotes from Allen Ginsberg

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.

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

What came is gone forever every time

I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with 'The Idiot,' Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky's idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.

I would say that Times Square was the central hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac, and myself from about 1945 to 1948.

It's time we did something to assert ourselves. After all, we do comprise 10% of the population.

I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.

We're all golden sunflowers inside.

We love to be hurt and we love to have our unhealing wounds opened and reopened again: we sit staring in the mirror of art, fascinated by our own deformities.

I have been wrathful all my life, angry against my father and all others. My wrath must end. All my images now are of heaven.

I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view.

America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I am 23, the year of the iron birthday, the gate of darkness. I am ill.

Truth is dissent, where all power resides in the Big Lie.

The desire to have power dissolves. The desire to dominate people for love dissolves. On the other hand, it's a relief to realize you can let go.

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

Now I have enough money to travel wherever I want, but I haven't got the health.

The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There's this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.

What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?

Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

War is good business Invest your son

Another lover hits the universe. The circle is broken. But with death comes rebirth. And like all lovers and sad people, I am a poet.

Man's usurpation over nature is an egotism that will destroy human as well as whale kingdoms. … Academies should return to wisdom study in tree groves rather than robot study in plastic cells