Walt Whitman

Sex is the root of it all—the animal want, the eager physical hunger, Sex will not be put aside; it is a great ordination of the universe.

Filthy to others, to me they are not filthy, but illustrious; while critics consider those subjects from the point of view of persons standing on the lowest animal and infidelistic platform. Which, then, is really the beast?

Expurgate, expurgate, expurgate! I've heard that till I'm deaf with it.

If I had cut sex out I might just as well have cut everything out. The bulk of the pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted. The full scheme would no longer exist—it would have been violated in its most sensitive spot.

The great poems, Shakspere [sic] included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy.

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us.

The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men.

I am for those who believe in loose delights, The woman that arouses a man, the man that arouses a woman.

I remember I saw only that man who passionately clung to me, Again we wander, we love, we separate again, Again he holds me by the hand, I must not go, I see him close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you/ That you may be my poem/ I whisper with my lips close to your ear/ I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.

Pointing to another world will never stop vice among us; shedding light over this world can alone help us.

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.

Our leading men are not of much account and never have been, but the average of the people is immense, beyond all history.

We will not have great individuals or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly great.

I am distrustful of any rules or public customs which interpose barriers between the leaders and the people.

Democracy, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training-school. It is life's gymnasium, not of good only, but of all.

The older I grow the more I am confirmed in my optimism, my democracy—not of course denying or excusing what is bad—but it is good, not bad, that is common. Beneath all the froth, illiteracy, worse, there is something latent—now and then to break forth—which cannot be defied, which saves us at last.

To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachable of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.

Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! — ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently.