Stephen Vincent Benet War Quotations

I have fallen in love with American names, The sharp names that never get fat, The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones.

Outcasts of war, misfits, rebellious souls,Seekers of some vague kingdom in the stars -They hide out in the hills and stir up trouble,Call themselves prophets, too, and prophesyThat something new is coming to the world,The Lord knows what!Well, it's a long time coming,And, meanwhile, we're the wheat between the stones.

Our earth is but a small star in a great universe. Yet of it we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexxed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color or theory.