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Absolute power corrupts absolutely and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves.

Howard Nemerov

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Howard Nemerov
Age: 71 †
Born: 1920
Born: February 29
Died: 1991
Died: July 5
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Government
Absolutes
Take
Absolute
Absolutely
Promise
Personal
Responsibility
Corrupts
Power
Promises
Care
Surrender

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.
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Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.
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Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
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History is where tensions were.
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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.
Howard Nemerov
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The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.
Howard Nemerov
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
Howard Nemerov