Robert Penn Warren Quotes

The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

Tell me a story. In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances, and starlight. The name of the story will be Time, But you must not pronounce its name. Tell me a story of deep delight.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

In separateness only does love learn definition.

History is all explained by geography.

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.

Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff...Willie, make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em mad, even mad at you. Stir them up and they'll love it and come back for more, but, for heaven's sakes, don't try to improve their minds.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.