...just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences. - Randall Jarrell

President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.

Since Pharaoh’s bits were pushed into the jaws of kings, these dyings — patient or impatient, but dyings — have happened, by the hundreds of millions; they were all wasted. They taught us to kill others and to die ourselves, but never how to live. Who is “taught to live” by cruelty, suffering, stupidity, and that occupational disease of soldiers, death?

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.