Allen Ginsberg Quotes

Allen Ginsberg was a prominent American poet. Influenced by Walt Whitman and others, Ginsberg became a key figure in the Beat Generation of Poets. One of his most well known works was "Howl." Read more about Allen Ginsberg, with these quotes.

• "America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."
  - Allen Ginsberg
  
  
• "...angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night..."
  - Allen Ginsberg
  
  
• "Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!"
  - Allen Ginsberg
  
  
• "Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."
  - Allen Ginsberg
  
  
• "How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier."
  - Allen Ginsberg
  
  
• "I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane."
  - Allen Ginsberg
  
  
• "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked."
  - Allen Ginsberg
  
  
• "It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now."
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• "My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed."
  - Allen Ginsberg
  
  
• "Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does."
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• "The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does."
  - Allen Ginsberg
  
  
• "...who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demaning instantaneous lobotomy, and who instead received the concrete void of insulin metrazol hydrotherapy electicity therapy occupational therapy pingpong and amnesia..."
  - Allen Ginsberg
  
  
• "There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now."
  - Allen Ginsberg
  
  
• "How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier."
  - Allen Ginsberg