Ezra Pound Quotes
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With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.
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Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law. ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality.
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If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
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Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.
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A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
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I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
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There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.
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If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
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Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.
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I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
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The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
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As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
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The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
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The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.
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A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
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The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
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Small talk comes from small bones.
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A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
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The temple is holy because it is not for sale.
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People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
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To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.
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Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.
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It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.
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Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.