"There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave."

"Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs."

"The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy."

"On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit […] Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong."

"One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well."

"Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfilment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon."

"In art there are tears that do often lie too deep for thoughts."

"The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination."

"The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy."

"There are, of course, good happy endings as well as bad ones, but surely they are of a kind that in some way expresses happiness rather than glibly promises it.."

"For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance."

"Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything."

"Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it."

"All other sins are open, Usura alone not understood."

"Pound's fascism-crazed mind"

"Pound's ideas about Russian communism developed in two directions. First, he felt that there were basic similarities between the Russian and the fascist revolutions. Second, he felt a great deal of admiration for Lenin as a man of action in the mold of his hero, Mussolini (this was not an entirely accidental comparison, for the contemporary figure most admired by Mussolini was Lenin)."

"Most of the great critics of English poetry have also been poets: Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to name a few."

"A musician once asked Ezra Pound if there was anywhere one could get all of poetry, in the sense that one could get all of music in Bach. Pound's response was that if a person would take the trouble really to learn Greek, he could get all of it, or nearly all of it, in Homer."

"I have been very excited by Ezra Pound's work with Chinese. People don't realize how much of Chinese culture is part of American culture. I mean, all those transcendentalists at the beginning of American writing."

"Personally I admire several writers (Céline, for instance) who have gone over to the Fascists, and many others whose political outlook I strongly object to. But one has the right to expect ordinary decency of a poet. I never listened to Pound’s broadcasts, but I often read them in the B.B.C. Monitoring Reports, and they were intellectually and morally disgusting. Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person. People who go in for that kind of thing must take the consequences."

"Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound."

"His intelligence indeed has been a flowering of Western self‐awareness, with life‐bestowing and poisonous blossoms intermingled, as if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant variety were both at once made manifest in it."

"Hence "the serious artist," whom Pound describes in an early essay as the maintainer of the mental health of the state, has concerns identical with the serious philosopher, the serious ruler, the serious editor or publisher, the serious teacher. He keeps up values."

"Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding."

"AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN."

"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."

"The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts."

"Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it."

"Literature is news that STAYS news."

"The author's conviction on this day of the New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music."

"A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him."

"To be men not destroyers"

"And for one beautiful day there was peace."

"A pity that poets have used symbol and metaphor and no man learned anything from them for their speaking in figures"

"Here is the core of evil, the burning hell without let-up, The canker corrupting all things, Fafnir the worm, Syphilis of the State, of all kingdoms Wart of the common-weal, Wenn-maker, corrupter of all things Darkness the defiler Twin evil of envy, Snake of the seven heads, Hydra, entering all things Passing the doors of temples defiling the grove of Paphos, neschek, the crawling evil, slime, the corrupter of all things, Poisoner of the fount, of all fountains, neschek, The serpent, evil against Nature's increase, Against beauty"

"I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak. that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made."

"Many errors, a little rightness."

"But the beauty is not the madness Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me. And I am not a demigod, I cannot make it cohere."

"And of man seeking good, doing evil."

"Pride, jealousy and possessiveness 3 pains of hell"

"The temple is holy because it is not for sale."

"You damn sadist!" said mr. cummings, "you try to make people think."

"To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame This is not vanity. Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered..."

"How mean thy hates Fostered in falsity [...] Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity"

"Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place"

"The ant's a centaur in his dragon world."

"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage"

"With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting [...] with usura hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall [...] no picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly"

"The blossoms of the apricot blow from the east to the west, And I have tried to keep them from falling."

"Without character you will be unable to play on that instrument"