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Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Poet
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University Teacher
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Theory
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Sciences
Cannot
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Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
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Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.
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Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
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We who must die demand a miracle. How could the Eternal do a temporal act, The Infinite become a finite fact? Nothing can save us that is possible: We who must die demand a miracle.
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Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
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It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.
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A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
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Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.
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The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
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We must love one another or die
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Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
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To be free is often to be lonely.
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The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.
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Words have no word for words that are not true.
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Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.
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The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.
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The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
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