Robert Penn Warren Quotes

If you're not at least willing to die for something- something that really matters- in the end, you die for nothing.

It is a blessing to die for a cause, because you can so easily die for nothing.

Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.

I always knew my death would be a possible consequence of the work I do. But for me it was a price I was willing to pay because this is what I believed in.

If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price upon conjecture.

We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.

Life is not worth living for which a man is not prepared to die at any moment.

What do you live for? Would you die for it?

A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.

If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Why don't people take the trouble to let you know that they are alive? It is so much more important. The whole system is wrong. No sooner do I die, than all the flowers I have ever longed for in life pour in.

I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating.

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.

Words are powerful. When I make mistakes I just try to come back and clarify what I meant.

It's great to want to be part of something, but it's a different thing completely to believe wholly in some type of movement, and to give everything for that something.

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

If what you do is being threatened as a profession, that could be scary. But that's the same reason why I walked out on stage many times after receiving death threats. I couldn't live without doing what I wanted to do. So at the same time I have to be willing to die for it.

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

You're not really ready to live unless you know what you're willing to die for.

One man with beliefs is equal to a thousand with only interests.

I shall die as I have lived, not as a politician but as a socialist.

When principles fail, men have only one way to save them and to preserve their faith, which is to die for them.