Whitman Quotes

Vegas has the Whitman's Sampler of audiences. They come from all different places, so you have to do some crowd psychology. You have to find the heartbeat of the room. It doesn't shift my jokes, but it shifts my timing and my attention.

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.

Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.

Some of his own closeness to nature, his great love for human beings, was passed on by Whitman to all of us who knew and loved him.

Now, in New Jersey, we have more government workers per square mile than any state in America. But since I've been governor we now have fewer people on the state payroll at any time since Christie Whitman left office in January 2001. That's the right direction, Mr. President, not the wrong direction.

I answer that question by saying: 'Why Meg Whitman' which is: I'm not a career politician. I spent 30 years in business. I can tell you that people in California have had it with career politicians: they are done.

There's something almost adolescent about Whitman's paean to everything that was and remains good about America.

I think Whitman more than any other poet possessed the gift of revealing to others the beauty of everything around us, the beauty of nature, the beauty of human beings.