Ezra Pound

"The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left."

"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."

"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."

"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)."

"Pound's fascism-crazed mind"

"Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite."

"It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work."

"Image…that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough."

"Who brought this to pass? Who has brought the flaming imperial anger? Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums? Barbarous kings. A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn, A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom, Three hundred and sixty thousand, And sorrow, sorrow like rain."

"One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns."

"Poetry must be as well written as prose."

"It has been complained, with some justice, that I dump my note-books on the public."

"Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists."

"The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation."

"Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one "Sordello.""

"Make it new!"

"Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."

"Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."

"But the one thing you shd. not do is suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY."

"Our own consciousness is incapable of having produced the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence"

"If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good."

"Both in Greece and in Provence the poetry attained its highest rhythmic and metrical brilliance at times when the arts of verse and music were most closely knit together, when each thing done by the poet had some definite musical urge or necessity bound up within it."

"My worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along."

"I never was. When I left the hospital I was still in America and all America is an insane asylum."

"The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity."

"Not one man in a thousand can be aroused to an interest in economics until he definitely suffers from the effects of an evil system."

"It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse."

"If a man have not order within him He can not spread order about him; And if a man have not order within him His family will not act with due order; And if the prince have not order within him He can not put order in his dominions."

"And even I can remember A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, I mean, for things they didn't know, But that time seems to be passing."

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

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

"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"

"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"

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

"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"

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

"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..."

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

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

"Pride, jealousy and possessiveness 3 pains of hell"

"And of man seeking good, doing evil."

"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."

"Many errors, a little rightness."

"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."

"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"

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

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

"And for one beautiful day there was peace."

"To be men not destroyers"