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Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren Quotes

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Famous Robert Penn Warren Quotes

“It is hard to remember.” “Remember what?” “All that goes into the making of any one moment we live. There are things one must try to remember. Do you know what is the hardest thing to remember?” “No,” Adam said. “Well, I’ll tell you, my son,” Aaron Blaustein said. “The hardest thing to remember is that other men are men.” He leaned to set his cup down. “But that,” he said, “is the only way you can be a man yourself. Can be anything.”

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Book:Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War
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“Furthermore, a society with no sense of the past, with no sense of the human role as significant not merely in experiencing history but in creating it can have no sense of destiny. And what kind of society is it that has no sense of destiny and no sense of self? That has no need or will to measure itself by the record of human achievement and the range of human endowment? And here we may pause to ask what our society measures itself by. Is it only by the ability to gratify immediate appetites, capacity for consumption, and the GNP?”

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Book:Democracy and Poetry
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“A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.”

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Book:A Time to Hear and Answer: Essays for the Bicentennial Season
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