Dan Burt famous quotes

American acculturation is a very powerful form of brainwashing. I know more about it now, but it's very difficult to move away from a world that you've been told was the greatest country on earth.
-- Dan Burt

#Country #Powerful #Moving

I was always worried about the dishonesty and meretriciousness that often accompanies ego. So I tried to make the memoir as factual and accurate and as unemotional as I could, and let readers make their own judgments on what happened. And, in fact, that's how I write poetry. I'm trying to present the reader with the experience itself, not with my commentary on it. So I adopted a style that I'd hoped would let me accomplish that.
-- Dan Burt

#Writing #Ego #Style

The experience taught me that the essence of a Cambridge education centers on two questions: What does it mean? How do you know?
-- Dan Burt

#Mean

When I left law school, I wanted to go into the government, into the tax policy area. I got the job that I wanted in the International Tax Council's office in Treasury. I arrived determined to change the world. But I discovered very quickly that the world couldn't care less. And I couldn't stomach the lying and stealing that I witnessed. I realized that the only difference between my mother's family and the senators and administrators that I was working with was that the latter wore suits and ties.
-- Dan Burt

#Lying #School #Office

I'm an old man, and I want to lay out what I think I understand. With poems like "Traitor," I'm examining my feelings, my convictions, my understanding of the world, and testing whether they're really true. So that when you hang your holster up, you can make a judgment on whether you have any integrity at all. That's what I care about. That's why I wrote it. If I can't write that poem, then I've got it wrong somehow.
-- Dan Burt

#Integrity #Writing #Men

A country scratching a lazy irritation at sagging doorjambs and late trains, whose greatest attribute is a collective, smelly tolerance, where a chap will put up with almost everything, which means he won't care about anything enough to get out of a chair.A country of public insouciance and private, grubby guilt, where you can believe anything as long as you don't believe it too fervently. A country where the highest aspiration is for a quiet life.

I think in this country we're committed to developing plays, and many plays I've seen have been rewritten too much. The scenes are tight, the play ends at the right time, you know exactly what the scene is about, but it seems flat; you can almost see that too many hands have been on the play. The individual voice is gone.

To Lawren Harris art was almost a mission. He believed that a country which ignored the arts left no record of itself worth preserving.

A hero would die for his country, but he'd much rather live for it.

There's a beauty to forgiveness, especially forgiveness that goes beyond rationality. Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great & powerful one

An interface can be a powerful narrative device. And as we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data, we have an opportunity, and maybe even an obligation, to maintain [our] humanity and tell some amazing stories.

If you want to shine like the sun, first burn like the sun.

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

As photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your eye straight on, to the left, around on the right. Watch them grow large as they approach, group and regroup as you shift your position. Relationships gradually emerge and sometimes assert themselves with finality. And that's your picture.