Quotes from Vachel Lindsay

I am unjust, but I can strive for justice. My life's unkind, but I can vote for kindness. I, the unloving, say life should be lovely. I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.

You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.

The only thing that a man may do that is new, is to write himself on human hearts.

Life is a loom, weaving illusion.

How can we help students to understand that the tragedy of life is not death; the tragedy is to die with commitments undefined and convictions undeclared and service unfulfilled?

My life is unjust, but I can strive for justice. My life is unkind, but I can vote for kindness.

Change the fabric of your own soul and your own visions, and you change all.

God lead us past the setting of the sun To wizard islands, of august surprise; God make our blunders wise.

To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name.

Except the Christ be born again tonight In dreams of all men, saints and sons of shame, The world will never see his kingdom bright.

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,Barrel-house kings; with feet unstable,Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,Pounded on the table,Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom.

A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black,A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawlMake him the quaint great figure that men love,The prairie-lawyer, master of us all.

Booth died blind and still by faith he trod,Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God.

Sleep softly… eagle forgotten… under the stone.

Factory windows are always broken.Somebody's always throwing bricks,Somebody's always heaving cinders,Playing ugly Yahoo tricks.

Be careful what you do,Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo,And all of the otherGods of the Congo,Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.

Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all.

Planting the trees that would march and trainOn, in his name to the great Pacific,Like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane,Johnny Appleseed swept on.

Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black,Cutting through the forest with a golden track.

They tried to get me—I got them first!

Except the Christ be born again tonight In dreams of all men, saints and sons of shame, The world will never see his kingdom bright.

I am unjust, but I can strive for justice. My life's unkind, but I can vote for kindness. I, the unloving, say life should be lovely. I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.

We left you there, lonely, Beauty your power, Wisdom your watchman, To hold the clay tower. from 'The Tale of the Tiger Tree

Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly, Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap, Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve, Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.