Various

“ It creates no blessings, no life. A tiny word that sinks down into the deep of the soul, and quietly does its work there of germinating and sprouting—this means infinitely more for the world than the “alarum” of all the professional and unprofessional bawlers. Deep rivers make least din. Light cares speak; mighty griefs are dumb. A heart must be profane indeed, in which there is nothing sacred to silence and the solemn sea. Once more, to quote Carlyle: “Under all speech that is good for anything lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.” ”

“ It is stillness which ultimately is the spiritual and moral might of the men who will possess the kingdom of earth. What if even the history of peoples “feigns a surface,” wears a mask, for those who having eyes see not, having ears hear not? What if men mistake Höllenlärm for messages of great occurrences in history, and on this account hold themselves aloof from those phenomena and experiences in which something new, a life of the heart, presses on to its birth-hour? Yet the human race will not always need or require noise and masks as its history rolls on. ”

“ If you have read Wilde’s Soul of Man Under Socialism you know the essence of Emma Goldman’s Anarchism. What is there about it to cause an epidemic of terror? It is merely the highest ideal of human conduct that has ever been evolved. Well, it is possible to get even the prejudiced to admit this much. Nearly everyone can see that government in its essence is tyranny; that one human being’s authority over another is a degrading thing; that no man should have the power to force his neighbor into a dungeon on the flimsy pretext that punishment is a prevention and a protection ”

“ The greatest thing about the dying Socrates, sipping away at his cup of hemlock, was the total absence of pathos and self-pity. Ah, if we but took half the pains to marshal forces of will in ourselves, that we now devote to conserving our weak wills, and to adducing all sorts of plausible reasons for their impuissance! If we but actually learned Herrenmoral, master-morality, that were indeed masterful and understood mastership! We are called to be masters by our creator, not only masters of the earth, but also masters of the spirit. ”

“ This is the real Emma Goldman—a visionist, if you will, but at the same time a woman with a deep faith in the superiority of reality to imagination. How she has lived life! How gallantly she makes the big out of the little and accepts without complaining the perverted role which has been thrust at her. To have seen her in her home with its hundreds of books and its charming old pictures of Ibsen and Tolstoy and Nietzsche and Kropotkin ”

“ But the chief study of mankind is still man, not nature and the gods. Man’s silences! Yes, amid the smoke of powder and clink of swords, peoples slash each other; and the men who make such uproar the people call great. But the might and work of a people are to be found in that quiet heroism, of which no one can discern anything outwardly—that quiet heroism to which no one can unveil monuments in our cities. It is the inaudible battles of the heart that this heroism fights; and the quieter it is, the more gloriously it shines. Men with big voices and mighty lungs we hear. ”

“ It is just not true that Christianity abhors master-morality and preaches a Sclavenmoral, a slave-morality. Yes it is true of the cowardly and inert thing that men call Christianity, this religion of the study-chair and the barracks which can make use of no master, because it summons just those powers to rule whose whole strength consists only in the weakness of others. But there is a Christianity which has been outright mighty force, outright master-instinct, this kingly Christianity, in whose presence a Pilate, and a Herod, with the entire host of their war-slaves, were feeble folk indeed ”

“ His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things from a dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each separate vision in a heap out on to the page; his restless intellect finds new and subtler shades of emotion and thought invisible to other pairs of eyes, and cannot, because speech is modeled on the average of our intelligences, find words to express them; he is always trembling on the brink of the inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne and Browning, and the comparison could be pushed farther still. ”

“ Zarathustra-Nietzsche hears the Höllenlärm, the hellish alarum, that men make in life, that life itself makes; he observes how men lend their ears to this noise, how they are frightened by it, or exult over it, how they think that the truth is the truer where the noise is the louder, how the howling of the storm signifies to men that something good and great must be taking place, some great event of history must be under way. ”

“ Whoever “feigns such surface,” wears such mask, is infinitely more honest and veracious than he who has no silence in his deep which cannot be speech on his tongue—a speech which is often only motions and noises of the tongue of him who pries curiously into what he is inwardly incompetent to understand, or offers a superficial and voluble sympathy for griefs of which he is as innocent as a babe unborn, or a jaunty appreciation of values and verities and virtues for which he has never sweat even a drop of blood. ”

“ It is, by itself, a remarkable thing, which will have an effect on all of us when the war stops and we begin to write again. To leave your pens and paper, to know that you have before you in the day, not an endless struggle with rhythm, rhyme, and editors, but a few hours’ drilling that is laborious and terminable—it is a rousing experience for a poet, mentally as well as physically. ”

“ Let nature peal and groan outside there, so that all gigantic forces seem to be released; then we have respect for her, we discern in such over-power even a divine creative force or a divine destructive will. Let people collide, the earth quake from thunder of cannon, and we signalize such a day in our history, pass it down from child to child, and we call such and such a battle a world-historical event. ”

“ In certain splendid moments Bauer seems like a high priest performing a tonal miracle, or like a potent magician weaving curious and impossible dream-fabrics. And, with all pleasant fancies put aside, he is an exponent of modern pianism at its best.
In music a light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a ’cello, a still darker a thunderous double bass; and the darkest blue of all—an organ.—Kandinsky.
Color is a power which directly influences the soul. Color is the key-board, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. ”

“ But the thing which takes your heart in a grip, and thrusts you quickly into the position of the small boy who longs to die for the object of his worship, is that imperative gift of motherhood which is hers and which spends itself with such utter prodigality upon all those who come to her for inspiration. Emma Goldman has ministered to every kind of human being from convicts to society women. She has no more idea of conservation than a lavish springtime; and where she draws courage and endurance and inspiration for it all will remain one of those mysteries which only the artist can explain. ”

“ It is not around the inventor of new noise, it is around the inventor of new values that the world revolves, inaudibly revolves.” I speak for myself alone, but these are words, Nietzsche words, for which I would gladly sacrifice whole volumes of moral and theological works. These words sharpen the eye and the ear for life-values which the majority of men today pass by—pass by more heedlessly perhaps than ever. These great words supply us with a criterion for the evaluation of questions of the moral life, a criterion that no one will cast aside who once comes to see what it means. ”

“ It is just because I am so deeply social that I put my hope in the individual.” It is because she hates injustice of any sort so passionately that she adopted Anarchism as the soundest method of combating it. If you have laws you must accept the abuses of law. Why not be more completely simple—why keep on pretending that we need a machinery which fosters tyrannies instead of giving freedom an unhandicapped path to begin upon its great responsibilities? This was the idealism upon which the American founders built—a minimum of government, at least, when that evil seemed to become a necessity. ”

“ Silence is sweeter than speech, more musical than song. Whoever has a deep in himself into which he alone descends and penetrates, a plus of his life that remains after we have known and weighed all his words and deeds, protects this deep and this plus from everything that could make a noise, from all mere words, from all intrusive and obtrusive tittle-tattle. Sich eine Oberfläche anheucheln, to feign a surface, to wear a mask, this is the original and fine insight into such psychology. ”

“ The more men kill what is really worthy of death, the less will they set out to kill each other. The more powerfully the will becomes conscious of its calling to master, the more strenuously men strive after greatness, human greatness, the more ridiculous will it come to seem to them in the course of time that the force of man should be sought in the force of his muscles, the mastership of man in the hoarded prerogative of powder and lead. ”

“ For it is in this very Nietzsche and his good war that mankind will now find its spirit of hope. We who see that wars of gunpowder are evil, we who intend to abolish them, cannot do so by denying our own strength and appealing helplessly to some external power in the sky. We must say with Zarathustra,
“How could I endure to be a man, if man were not also the composer, the riddle-reader, and the redeemer of chance! ”

“ Have you thought of the tremendous evil that your organ brings into American homes, breaking family ties, killing respect for authorities, sowing venomous seeds of Antichrist-Nietzsche-Foster, lauding such inhuman villains as Wilde and Verlaine, crowning with laurels that bloodthirsty Daughter of Babylon, Emma Goldman, and committing similar atrocities? God hear my prayer and turn your wicked heart to repentance.
A. Faun, Paris:
In one of your issues I read with delight Wilde’s paradox: “There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is entirely too splendid to be sane.” ”

“ A bleeding chunk of reality is not art, but it is a bleeding chunk of reality; your aesthetic emotions may sleep at the sight of a tortured animal, but your humane emotions will roll up to your throat when you witness the simple tragedy of a Jewish girl in St. Petersburg, presented in Michael Morton’s play, The Yellow Ticket. To me such a realistic play in such a realistic presentation has as little to do with dramatic art as a reporter’s story has to do with literature; but I brushed aside my memories of Rheinhardt and Komissarzhevskaya when I went to see a piece of Russian life at Powers’. ”

“ One realizes dimly that such spirits live somewhere in the world: history and legend and poetry have proclaimed them, and at times we hear of their passing; but to meet one on its valiant journey is like being whirled to some far planet and discovering strange new glories. ”

“ And so Emma Goldman continues her work, talking passionately to crowds of people, sickened by audiences who listen merely out of curiosity, disheartened by the vapid applause of those who make their own incapacities the burden of their rebellion, heartbroken by the masses who cannot respond to any ideal, cheered by the few who understand, dedicated to an eternal hope of new values. ”

“ After the first shock was over, during the four years of our Civil War, wages were higher, men were better employed, production greater, and distribution more equal than it had been at any time excepting in the extreme youth of the Republic. Then land was free.
Then again, this world has little to destroy. After centuries of so-called civilization, the human race has not accumulated enough to last a year should all stop work. The world lives, and always has lived, from hand to mouth. ”

“ With the shallow inferences from these conceptions Nietzsche had no patience. If the fittest survives, the fittest is not necessarily the best. The brute force which makes for survival had no attraction for Nietzsche. He called upon man’s will to make itself the deciding factor in the struggle. When he argued for strength, he argued for the strength of the beautiful and noble, not strength for its own sake. Of what avail is a great individual to the world if he makes himself weak and sacrifices himself to an inferior enemy? ”

“ America will recognize its failure some day, after the brave spirit has done its work—after the spasm of the new war has ushered in quite simply some of the changes which Emma Goldman has been pleading for during her years of fighting. ”

“ The Spiritual Dangers of Writing Vers Libre Eunice Tietjens
The spiritual dangers that beset a struggling poet are almost as numerous as his creditors, and quite as rampant. And woe unto him who falls a prey to any one of them! For poetry, being the immediate reflection of the spiritual life of its author, degenerates more quickly than almost any other form of human expression when this inner life goes astray.
There is first of all the danger of sentimentality, an ever-present, sticky danger that awaits patiently and imperturbably and has to be met afresh every day. ”

“ All persons, and there are many, who are determined willy nilly to believe the world a nice place; who, confronted with the unlovely, the stark, gaping and horrid, cast down their eyes exclaiming “It is not there,” will take solid comfort in The Spirit of Life. It is like the millions of sermons droned out one day in seven all over the land to patient folk who no longer know why they come nor why they stay to hear. ”

“ Would it not be to preach a decadent morality as do all the pusillanimous and the hirelings who beg for the protection of their weakness because they do not have the strength to drive and force their way through life? ”

“ To me the word “democracy,” as many another beautiful word, has lost its original lofty meaning and has come to rhyme with mediocrity, with the strangling of the Few of the Mountain by the Many of the Valley. Could you name many great things that the most democratized countries, like America and Switzerland, have produced outside of Schweitzer-cheese and Victrolas? Has there ever been a great individualist who appeared as a child of his age, as an outgrowth and a reflection of a democracy? ”

“ You would observe that the urgent, immediate mania, in these red souls, is to deprive themselves quickly of their vehement independence, to give the government of their party to the oldest of their number; that is to say, to the greatest opportunist, to the most prudent, in a word, to the one who having already acquired a little force, and a little authority, will be fatally interested in conserving the present state of things, in calming violence, in opposing all desire for adventure, for risk, and heroism. ”