Various

“ Because anarchism and art are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason.
An anarchist is a person who realizes the gulf that lies between government and life; an artist is a person who realizes the gulf that lies between life and love. The former knows that he can never get from the government what he really needs for life; the latter knows that he can never get from life the love he really dreams of.
Now there is only one class of people—among the very rich or the very poor or the very middling—that doesn’t know about these things. ”

“ Why do you want to govern human nature? Because you want people to be good instead of bad? But how can you tell when they’re good and when they’re bad? Suppose you all agree that Jean Crones did a very bad thing? If you knew Jean Crones you should probably all see at once that he is a very good man—if he exists at all. Clear up your thinking!
Who ever told you that an anarchist wants to change human nature? Who ever told you that an anarchist’s ideal could never be attained until human nature had improved? ”

“ His writing is literature par excellence, but it lacks a soul. If in his meticulous analyses of life he could suggest the vision of the swallowing up of the macrocosm in the macrocosm—could suggest what humanity as a whole could do to wipe out the evils that feed upon the individual—he might be god-like. But like all of the rest of you he is a dead fly in the sickening syrup of laissez faire, at the mercy of Mother Nature. Now it isn’t worth while for you to resent this. Go to work and read what I have been able to get out of The Egoist, showing up anarchy for all that it is worth. ”

“ In the thickness of a red evening, the hall deserted, one heart still beats. Ta-or grieves over her lost love—alone. I have been to Egypt ... learned the ways of women—and the world!
Petrouchka.—Primary things: red, blue, yellow; love, hate, jealousy; people and artists. All told together in a ballet whose dramatic unification finds its remarkable inspiration in the music. No doubt Stravinsky’s most important music for the stage. Pétrouchka, eternal paradox of beauty encased in ugliness. His jealousy of the Moor, who also loves the Ballerine, is the ballet, and the music. Foremost the music! ”

“ Human nature will never “improve.” It doesn’t matter much whether you have a good nature or a bad one. It’s your thinking that counts. Clean out your minds!
If you believe these things—no, that is not enough: if you live them—you are an anarchist. You can be one right now. You needn’t wait for a change in human nature, for the millennium, or for the permission of your family. Just be one!
You have seen that “the blind, heavy, stupid thing we call government” can not give you a happy childhood. It cannot educate you or make you an interesting person. ”

“ If you think that love and freedom ought to go together the government can put you in prison.
If you marry out of respect for the government, and grow to hate each other, the government won’t give you a divorce out of respect for you. ”

“ Editorials THE ESSENTIAL THING. The Little Review is a magazine of Art and Revolution. If you ask me which it believes in most I shall have to say—Art. Because there is no real revolution unless it is born of the same spirit which produces real art.
A man like Bill Haywood doesn’t agree with this. “Why do you ask why some one doesn’t start the revolution?” he says; “don’t you see that we’re in the midst of a revolution now?” No, I don’t see it. I see evolution at work in labor—not revolution. But I see something more than evolution at work in the arts—music, painting, poetry. ”

“ Heaven knows you’ve got all the government you can very well use and you pay too much for everything.
Does the government give you a house? If you happen to be an ambassador or something like that. Not if you happen to be a mail man. Maybe some one leaves you a house—which means that he once bought it or stole it or had it left to him. You can do any of these three things yourself. Or you can go without, as nearly every one else does. Sometimes the government helps you to steal one—but not you of the middle-class. What I want to know is why you are so crazy about the government? ”

“ For “Mother Nature” is an old-wife of incredible stupidity, socially considered, and must needs be pulled up by the hair of her head at every whip-stitch, by her ever-evolving offspring, in order that they may transform her social stupidity into scientific truth. Social evolution depends entirely upon the discovery of such scientific truth and its application to the social order, and such application can be made only step by step through a social ego powerful enough to compel such application. ”

“ Don’t imagine that printing a poem as prose makes it prose. A musical masterpiece may be distorted by unrhythmic playing, yet the composer’s rhythm remains intact in the score.
Don’t object to conceptions in poetry that you might find striking and powerful in bronze or plaster. “The Hog Butcher of the World” is one picturesque attitude of Chicago.... Is the truth unbearable? One may still love Chicago in spite of its dirty face. ”

“ Admit that your life, you critics, living for art as you pretend to, is made up of just such things—in fact if you were honest you’d admit your entire life is wholly, first and last, rooted, aye, dwelling on just this episode, and yet you cry aloud unto the heavens ‘indecent,’ ‘revolting,’ ‘offensive’ when it is beautifully simple and much more perfectly presented before you than you’ll ever experience it yourself. ”

“ It isn’t the government or law or anything of that sort that gives you food or clothes. It’s the efficient organization between those who produce these things and those who sell them to you. And it isn’t government that keeps that organization efficient. It’s the brains of those who work in it. You will say that government exists to prevent that organization from charging you too much for food and clothes. Then why doesn’t government do it? ”

“ The faun leaves his knoll and moves into the decorative sphere of the maidens. Beautiful movement, repressed, conventionalized. A scarf is left by one of the maidens; they have all left the faun. He has nothing but this to remember them by. Returning to his mossy rock he possesses the scarf. No lover more delicately held the body of his love or with more reverence knelt toward her. The curtain lowers here—the faun is left to dream. ”

“ It is for lack of a social ego having such control and that unity in establishing the above-mentioned principles in the social order, alone, that “men continue to support institutions they no longer believe in, that women continue to live with men they no longer love, that youth continues to submit to age it no longer respects,” and it is the only agency that can help one to be free when one wants to be free or make one a personality instead of a nonentity. ”

“ Eddy, who is a lawyer, to prove that no good thing is ever lost.
Don’t expect poets to refrain from writing about one another—even in praise. If you don’t enjoy the feast, don’t eat it. When the poets tear one another to pieces, don’t you enjoy it? But if, like most critics of poetry, you are a poet also, take warning. Be prepared!
Don’t wait until a poet is dead before you discover him. ”

“ The whole story of social evolution in a nutshell is as follows: every phase of the social order at any stage of social evolution is maintained by a social ego or group sufficiently powerful to dominate the rest of the surrounding social body,—and this phase can be changed only by revolution—bloodless or otherwise,—on the part of a new social ego desiring this change and developing power to establish and maintain it. ”

“ And blood; and perhaps, one might say,
A scrap of soul, to make the creature go;
But these things nature furnishes;
They’re free and plenty:
And after a man’s once started, he’s not long growing;
There’s always a generation on the way:
More than we want, sometimes, or there is room for.
Lord, how they swarm! In the cities like flies. ”

“ The social ego that has such control “can do anything.” It can stop war with a turn of its hand and establish in its stead world-wide service, kindness, brotherhood, peace, joy and beauty. And there is nothing else in the universe that can do this. ”

“ I am convinced that the secret and the beauty of the Imagists lies somehow in the look of the words, and that if you have only a feeling for the sounds of words you will never love Imagism. Witter Bynner, who was also there, made an amusing little speech about how the Imagists substitute color for sound, sensation for emotion, and concentrate upon technique instead of upon that for which technique is intended. And then Alice Corbin Henderson had the last word. “After all the discussion about Imagism I am surprised to find that no one really seems to know what it is!... ”

“ Masters sitting with Robinson’s book in one hand, and somebody’s Small Town in the other, inditing Spoon River with his teeth!
Don’t expect a poet to repeat himself indefinitely, however much you may admire his earlier work. You may appreciate his later work in time.
Don’t condemn the work of a man whose books you have not read. Unfortunately there are no civil service examinations for critics.
Don’t think that competition is unhealthy for the poet, or that his poetry suffers thereby. ”

“ You can argue that D’Annunzio, who said this, is neither a very great man nor a very great artist. Nevertheless it is what Beethoven did; and it is what Jeanne d’Arc did.... It is what Bill Haywood does; but it is not what most labor leaders do, or what most radicals do. It is not what the laborers themselves do. How horrible it is to realize that when a man is slaving for his very life he can not be selective in what he does, that he has no dream left to magnify, and yet that he must have or perish.... ”

“ Your sin against the public is more grievous, and your art less, than his.
Don’t make up your review from the publisher’s advance notice. The poet might like to know what you think about his work—not what he told the publisher to tell you.
Don’t expect a poet to punch a time-clock, or record only the emotions of his fellow townspeople.
Don’t limit a poet to primary emotions, or find decadence in a refinement that may exceed your own.
Don’t fancy that brutality is strength, or delicacy weakness.
Don’t fancy that the poem that gives up its meaning quickest gives most, or lives longest. ”

“ Stupid, pernicious prudery long has blinded us to sexual truth. Science was slow in entering this vital field. In recent years commercialists eyeing profits have unloaded many unscientific and dangerous sex books. Now the world’s great scientific minds are dealing with this subject upon which human happiness often depends. No longer is the subject tabooed among intelligent people.
We take pleasure in offering to the American public, the work of one of the world’s greatest authorities upon the question of sexual life. ”

“ As for the poetic anarchists, who draw moving pictures of the beautiful time to come, when humanity will voluntarily organize to abolish all man-made law (which they consider the only social evil, not realizing that the evil is not in law, per se, but in the kind of law) , and who look to “Mother Nature” for social guidance,—these will wait and look till the crack of doom, in vain. ”

“ And so, in the name of Christ, whose name they give to all their wickedness—that Christ, who forgave a woman that was not blind for sins beside which this sin of Unity’s was pure and white—in the name of this God, I say, they seized her sightless, wondering soul and threw it, a sacrifice, to those bloody wolves they call their virtue. ”

“ I wonder what is his reason for painting: he certainly does not love his work. Something suddenly interferes with my thoughts on this subject: it is the jingling of coin in a visitor’s pocket. I look around and find number 174 by the same gentleman, and it reminds me of a cat walking on the keyboard of a stringless piano.
They say this is the best exhibition of the Chicago Artists. If it is, Mr. Juergens has done nothing to make it good. He has six such things on the walls.
Mr. Albright, a painter of children playing in the open, has seven pictures in the exhibit, five of them on one wall. ”

“ The only professed anarchists that make any impression upon the world are of three kinds: either they are spirits of revolt of the most bitterly, materialistically tyrannical sort; or they are those who suffer with the oppressed and strive individually to set them free, even to the point of self-martyrdom; or they are sentimentalists who maunder maudlinly on about love and justice and yet do absolutely nothing to bring about the love of justice or the justice of love, either in their preaching or their practice. ”

“ Anarchy is scientifically a reductio ad absurdum and those who claim to be anarchists are self-deceivers,—minds that cannot complete a circuit of reason. There is no place in reason for anarchy, hence there is not and cannot be an anarchist on a basis of reason. All who call themselves so are either archists of the most rabid sort or helpless flies in the sticky syrup of laissez faire. ”

“ Why are you so crazy about the government?
Why do you want to govern anything or anybody?—even your own temper? Nietzsche said not to preserve yourself but to discharge yourself! Why not use your temper as well as your nice moods? ”

“ Pointing his finger at the picture, the lawyer began to talk. A new quality came into his voice. His hand played nervously up and down the table. There was a gentle swishing sound of the blown curtain across the top of the coffin.
“I saw one once when I was a boy,” he said, pointing with his finger at the stallion.
He approached and stood over her.
“It was a wonderful sight,” he said, looking down at her. “I have never forgotten it. The great animal was all life, vibrant, magnificent life. Its feet scarcely touched the ground.” ”

“ If you marry as a concession to the government, because you don’t want to ruin your business or have your wife insulted, the government will divorce you—and on the concession basis: but you pay for both the concessions. ”