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My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.
W. H. Auden
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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
Composer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Poet
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University Teacher
Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Tell
Deepest
Truth
Politicians
Must
Politician
Never
Dangerous
People
Feeling
Humored
Possible
Lunatics
Politics
Avoided
Feelings
Carefully
More quotes by W. H. Auden
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
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Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
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Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
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Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.
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Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.
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Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally, there would be no speculators. In practice, every member of the audience should feel like an understudy.
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Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly, The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.
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How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.
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The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.
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Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place.
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Look if you like, but you will have to leap.
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Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.
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History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
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We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.
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The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists
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No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
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I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
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Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
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Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.
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