“The headlong stream is termed violent But the river bed hemming it in is Termed violent by no one.”

First the grub, then the morals.

People who understand everything get no stories.

First the pork chops, then morality

In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.

The finest plans have always been spoiled by the littleness of them that should carry them out. Even emperors can’t do it all by themselves.

The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.

The fanatics for progress often have too little appreciation of the existing.

Unhappiness doesn’t grow on the chest like leprosy. Poverty won’t fall off the roof like a loose tile, no; poverty and unhappiness are man’s doing.

When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.

It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality.

A theater without beer is just a museum

When the house of a great one collapses Many little ones are slain.

Terrible is the temptation to be good.

Would it not be simpler If the Government dissolved the people and elected another?

All artforms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living.

Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.

You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.

THE HOT (AND SERIOUSLY COOL) ENERGY that comes from the musical gospel preached by the title character of FELA! feels as if it could stretch easily to the borders of Manhattan and then across a river or two. There should be dancing in the streets!

We are on the Colorado — that means something more to me than electric power or a harnessed river.

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

River is time in water; as it came, still so it flows, yet never is the same.

We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.

A river of images and thoughts and feelings, dirtied and polluted so that no one could drink from it without gagging.