Walt Whitman on Democracy
I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
Walt Whitman on Poetry
The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.
Walt Whitman on Friendship
I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I do not believe I deserved my friends.