Richard Huelsenbeck

"Dada hurts. Dada does not jest, for the reason that it was experienced by revolutionary men and not by philistines who demand that art be a decoration for the mendacity of their own emotions.. .I am firmly convinced that all art will become dadaistic in the course of time, because from Dada proceeds the perpetual urge for its renovation."

"As Arp and I are sitting in the large living room of my house on Central Park in November 1958, we try again and again to understand the significance of Dada for ourselves and for others. Many elements surfaced in me and in the 'Fantastic Prayers' [his poems Phantastische Gebete, Zurich 1916] at the same time; resistance against the 'civilization' we live in, fury about a purely factual world which leaves out personality and thus creative power, the means of irony and underlying religiousness. Ball turned religious during the times of dadaism, Arp is a religious person today, and I have always been one, without wanting to realize it, perhaps without knowing it."

"There is a difference between sitting quietly in Switzerland [Dada in Zurich] and bedding down on a vulcano, as we did in Berlin."

"[ Tinguely is a] Meta-Dadaist... [who had] fulfilled certain ideas of ours, notably the idea of motion."

"The dissection of words into sounds is contrary to the purpose of language and applies musical principles to an independent realm whose symbolism is aimed at a logical comprehension of one’s environment.. ..the value of language depends on comprehensibility rather than musicality"

"The cows sit on the telegraph poles and play chess The cockatoo under the skirts of the Spanish dancer Sings as sadly as a headquarters bugler and the cannon lament all day..."

"That is the lavender landscape Herr Mayer was talking about when he lost his eye Only the fire department can drive the nightmare from the drawing- room but all the hoses are broken..."

"Have you seen the fish that have been standing in front of the opera in cutaways for the last two days and nights..? Ah ah ye great devils – ah ah ye keepers of bees and commandments With a bow wow wow with a bow woe woe who does today not know what our Father Homer wrote..."

"I hold peace and war in my toga but I'l take a cherry flip Today nobody knows whether he was tomorrow They beat time with a coffin lid If somebody had the nerve to rip the tail feathers out of the trolley car it's a great age..."

"The professors of zoology gather in the meadows With the palms of their hands they turn back the rainbows the great magician sets the tomatoes on his forehead Again thou hauntest castle and grounds The roebuck whistles the stallion bounds (And this is how the world is this is all that's ahead of us)"

"Huelsenbeck has arrived [from Berlin]. He pleads for an intensification of rhythm (Negro rhythm). He would prefer to drum literature into the ground."

"So, Huelsenbeck has put our feud in print -- HA HA So he sneers at my bourgeois home -- my child who cries, who has to be changed and fed So he laughs at my solid wife -- that she's no Anna Bloom.. ..The one who makes art -- he's the artist.. .So I spit back at you, Huelsenbeck But where you spit venom, I spit art I laugh at you -- HA HA -- I laugh at you"

"When the word 'Dada' came to me [in German: 'mir begegnete'], I was called upon twice by Dionysios [Areopagita]. D.A. – D.A. (H...k [= Huelsenbeck] wrote about this mystical birth [of the new word, Dada], as did I in earlier notes)"