Allen Ginsberg

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

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (3 June 1926 – 5 April 1997) was an American Beat poet born in Newark, New Jersey. He was a central figure among Beat Generation writers. Ginsberg is best known for "Howl", a long poem about consumer society's negative human values.

Quotes

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose.

1. You can't win. 2. You can't break even. 3. You can't even get out of the game.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose.
- Glen Burns (1983), Great Poets Howl: A Study of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry, 1943-1955, Peter Lang GmbH, ISBN 3-8204-7761-6

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.
- Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son, Allen and Louis Ginsberg (1944-1976), Michael Schumacher (ed.) (2001), Bloomsbury Publishing NY, ISBN 1582341079, p. 21.

1. You can't win. 2. You can't break even. 3. You can't even get out of the game.
- Wiggins, Arthur W.; Harris, Sidney (2007). The Joy of Physics. Prometheus Books. p. 186. ISBN 1-59102-590-7.
- These statements are known collectively as "Ginsberg's theorem", a restatement of the three Laws of Thermodynamics.