Ezra Pound Quotes
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A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.
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Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
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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.
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The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.
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Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom.
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See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back.
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Either move or be moved.
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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.
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But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
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There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
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And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
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Artists are the antennae of the race.
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Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.
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Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
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Christ can very well stand as an heroic figure. The hero need not be of wisdom all compounded. Also he is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on to him.
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The man who fears war and squats opposing My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
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Technique is the test of sincerity.
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The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.
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Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.
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Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.
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Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry
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Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.
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A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
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America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.