Allen Ginsberg quotes

Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and leading figure of the Beat Generation. His work challenged conventions and addressed issues of politics, sexuality, and personal freedom. He became an icon of counterculture and a passionate advocate for free expression. Here are 83 of his quotes:

America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

Allen Ginsberg

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.

Allen Ginsberg

Poets are damned... but see with the eyes of angels.

Allen Ginsberg

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

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.

Allen Ginsberg

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.

Allen Ginsberg

I know too much and not enough.

Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

Allen Ginsberg

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

Allen Ginsberg

I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view.

Allen Ginsberg

Everybody's serious but me.

Allen Ginsberg

I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.

Allen Ginsberg

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Allen Ginsberg

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. By poetry I mean the imagining of what has been lost and what can be found-the imagining of who we are and the slow realization of it.

Allen Ginsberg

Our heads are round so thought can change direction.

Allen Ginsberg

What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?

Allen Ginsberg

You too must seek the sun.

Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

Allen Ginsberg

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter.

Allen Ginsberg

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

Allen Ginsberg

You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism.

Allen Ginsberg

The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene.

Allen Ginsberg