Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.
NUMBER:
454
AUTHOR:
W. B. Yeats (18651939)
QUOTATION:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
ATTRIBUTION:
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, The Second Coming, lines 18, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, pp. 4012 (1957).