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Allen Ginsberg
18 quotes
“The war is language, language abused for Advertisement, language used like magic for power on the planet.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From Wichita Vortex Sutra (1966)
“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. By poetry I mean the imagining of what has been lost and what can be found—the imagining of who we are and the slow realization of it.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in C. F. Main & Peter J. Seng, Poems (Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1973), p. 3
“Millions of fathers in rain Millions of mothers in pain Millions of brothers in woe Millions of sisters nowhere to go Millions of daughters walk in the mud Millions of children wash in the flood A Million girls vomit & groan Millions of families hopeless alone Millions of souls nineteen seventy one homeless on Jessore road under grey sun A million are dead, the million who can Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland where you’re madder than I am I’m with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange I’m with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother I’m with you in Rockland where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries I’m with you in Rockland”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I smoke marijuana every chance I get.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“America, Sacco & Vanzetti must not die.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The CIA and the Mafia are in cahoots”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hadda be Playin' on a Jukebox (1975).
“Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Glen Burns (1983), Great Poets Howl: A Study of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry, 1943-1955, Peter Lang GmbH, .
“You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son, Allen and Louis Ginsberg (1944-1976), Michael Schumacher (ed.) (2001), Bloomsbury Publishing NY, , p. 21.
“I saw Bob Dylan a couple of weeks ago (this being, what, December 1994?) and he was saying… “Who owns all the money? Who owns the media?”. As he travels around the world, he notices that all the media change their story every week, and someone is directing that. And “Who owns all the money?”, he was saying. And it was like he knew that he had a great deal of power, to influence people’s psyches, or minds, or thinking, or psychology, or opinion-ation, and yet his power was miniscule, compared to the power of the moguls of the media. And in America it’s only 22 people who run… who own… 80 percent of the mass-media, so that the… it would be very difficult for a poem… for a poet… to overcome that barrage of bullshit. On the other hand, poetry is the only place where you get an individual person telling his subjective truth, what he really thinks, as distinct from what he wants people to think he thinks (like a politician or someone preparing an editorial in a dignified newspaper). So if you need the historical truth of what people think inside, you have to follow Shelley (and his admonition is that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the race”) — or what William Carlos Williams said more acutely was, “The government is of words”. After all, the people making political speeches, they’re writing prose, if not poetry, and they are trying to get a little flowery language in there, but the language is shifty, and the language is manipulative, and people who are advertising, or even doing ordinary mass-media, are still inhibited and can’t say what they really think, but the poet can say what he really thinks, authentically, and that’s the advantage, and it’s longer-lasting than the immediate radio-broadcast or television-broadcast, because a poem is like a radio that can broadcast continually, for thousands of years. And so, in the long run, it may have an ameliorating effect on the spirit.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Face to Face, BBC, 1994.
“I could issue manifestos summoning seraphim to revolt against the Heavenly State we're in, or trumpets to summon American mankind to rebellion against the Authority which has frozen all skulls in the cold war, That is, I could, make sense, invoke politics and try organize a union of opinion about what to do to Cuba, China, Russia, Bolivia, New Jersey, etc. However since in America the folks are convinced their heaven is all right, those manifestos make no dent except in giving authority & courage to the small band of hipsters who are disaffected like gentle socialists. Meanwhile the masses the proletariat the people are smug and the source of the great Wrong. So the means then is to communicate to the grand majority- and say I or anybody did write a balanced documented account not only of the lives of America but the basic theoretical split from the human body as Reich has done- But the people are so entrenched in their present livelihood that all the facts in the world-such as that China will be 1/4 of world pop makes no impression at all as a national political fact that intelligent people can take counsel on and deal with humorously & with magnificence. So that my task as a politician is to dynamite the emotional rockbed of inertia and spiritual deadness that hangs over the cities and makes everybody unconsciously afraid of the cops- To enter the Soul on a personal level and shake the emotion with the Image of some giant reality-of any kind however irrelevant to transient political issue- to touch & wake the soul again- That soul which is asleep or hidden in armor or unable to manifest itself as free life of God on earth- To remind by chord of deep groan of the Unknown to most Soul- then further politics will take place when people seize power over their universe and end the long dependence on an external authority or rhetorical set sociable emotions-so fixed they don't admit basic personal life changes-like not being afraid of jails and penury, while wandering thru gardens in high civilization.”
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gordon Ball (1977), Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties, Grove Press NY