“It can't be dead. It was alive just a minute ago.”
On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
The same is true of what we write: it walks and it talks, but it can be dead-alive or alive-alive. What is truly alive stops before nothing and ceaselessly seeks answers to absurd, "childish" questions. Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken — errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs. And if answers be impossible of attainment, all the better! Dealing with answered questions is the privilege of brains constructed like a cow's stomach, which, as we know, is built to digest cud.
“A dead man in Spain is more alive than a dead man anywhere in the world.”
Un muerto en España está más vivo como muerto que en ningún sitio del mundo.
"Theory and Play of the Duende" from A Poet in New York (1940)
“You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can't care anyway.”
On Death
“You can't murder a man who's been dead for five centuries.”
Prof. Von Helsing, defending himself against the charge of having murdered Count Dracula
Dracula's Daughter (1936)
“The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes”
139
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
Des MacHale, Wit, Andrews McMeel Publishing, Kansas City (KS), 2003, ISBN 978-0-7407-3330-7, page 197 https://books.google.ca/books?id=Dhlgd_Af1C4C&pg=PA197
Misattributed
“If you can't take care of me while I'm alive, you have made me dead anyway.”
Source: Gone Girl
A man must say what he believes clearly, without dogma, and without guile.
Statement during the 1968 election campaign, as quoted in party literature. "Pierre Elliott Trudeau for Canada", 1968 leaflet http://www.ebay.com/itm/Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau-for-Canada-1968-Leaflet-Bill-Vander-Zalm-Liberal-Party-BC/322004097304?_trksid=p2045573.c100033.m2042&_trkparms=aid%3D111001%26algo%3DREC.SEED%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20131017132637%26meid%3D9020a37aa0b24dd68f1d3f5025b50b52%26pid%3D100033%26rk%3D2%26rkt%3D4%26sd%3D381542319016
