Quote

Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.

Robert Hass

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Robert Hass
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 1
Literary Critic
Poet
Teacher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Robert L. Hass
Taken
Massive
Death
Revenge
Someone
Task
Mobilize
Always
Profession
Domination
Tasks
Engineering
Military
Scale
Imagination
Appeals
Economic
Scales

More quotes by Robert Hass

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Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
Robert Hass
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Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
Robert Hass
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I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.
Robert Hass
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What we usually find is that when people think they have a new idea or approach something for the first time, it is actually a recurrence of a line of thinking explored in the past.
Robert Hass
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The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too
Robert Hass
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What Simone Weil said politics has meant all along, which means that you fight for 11 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent, that you avoid golden-age thinking and romantic melancholy and you just keep pushing.
Robert Hass
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You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools.
Robert Hass
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Writing is an incessant process of discovery.
Robert Hass
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Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.
Robert Hass
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I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
Robert Hass
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The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called Rusia en 1931. This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.
Robert Hass
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One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.
Robert Hass
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[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.
Robert Hass
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It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.
Robert Hass
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If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.
Robert Hass
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My first book was published when I was thirty-two, so I think it was basically finished when I was thirty or thirty-one. And so then you think, Well, what have you failed to do? And my answer to myself was almost everything.
Robert Hass
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There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.
Robert Hass
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In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate.
Robert Hass
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Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.
Robert Hass
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I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous.
Robert Hass