186 Quotes by Robert Penn Warren

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn’t real anyway.

What you don’t know don’t hurt you, for it ain’t real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist. I was.

She cleared them out, and fast. The car went off down the gravel road with the springs flat on the rear axle and human flesh oozing out the windows, then the evening quiet descended upon us.

My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don’t have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.

That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.

History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal’s own hand and every man is suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know.

He was a lawyer now and it had taken him a long time. It had taken him a long time because he had had to be a lawyer on his own terms and in his own way. But that was over. But maybe it had taken him too long. If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting. In the end they just ask you those crappy little questions.