
““Ah, yes, the spiritual realm.” In those days “spiritual” was my least favorite word. It still is.”
Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 7 (p. 141)
Fragment No. 2
Blüthenstaub (1798)
Context: Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word Liberty entire nations.
““Ah, yes, the spiritual realm.” In those days “spiritual” was my least favorite word. It still is.”
Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 7 (p. 141)
“Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!”
Source: The Path to Rome (1902), p. xi
as quoted in The Sound of Poetry / The poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin; University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 310, note 22
a critic on the sound-poetry of Dadaist Hugo Ball
“And don’t confound the language of the nation
With long-tailed words in osity and ation.”
The Monks and the Giants (published c. 1871), canto i, line 6, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Europa es dividite per le muros de 30 linguas. Felicemente, inter iste linguas national, circa 10.000 parolas de origine grec e latin son commun. Iste preciose tresor linguistic debe esser utilisate al maximo sin mutilar un sol parola o inventar alteres.
Revista de Interlingua, nº 48, 1970.
“Now for the remedy. It is in one word, the only word that ever brought equity anywhere — LIBERTY!”
Sex Slavery (1890)
Context: Now for the remedy. It is in one word, the only word that ever brought equity anywhere — LIBERTY! Centuries upon centuries of liberty is the only thing that will cause the disintegration and decay of these pestiferous ideas. Liberty was all that calmed the bloodwaves of religious persecution! You cannot cure serfhood by any other substitution. Not for you to say "in this way shall the race love." Let the race alone.
Will there not be atrocious crimes? Certainly. He is a fool who says there will not be. But you can't stop them by committing the arch-crime and setting a block between the spokes of Progress-wheels. You will never get right until you start right.
As for the final outcome, it matters not one iota. I have my ideal, and it is very pure, and very sacred to me. But yours, equally sacred, may be different and we may both be wrong. But certain am I that with free contract, that form of sexual association will survive which is best adapted to time and place, thus producing the highest evolution of the type. Whether that shall be monogamy, variety, or promiscuity matters naught to us; it is the business of the future, to which we dare not dictate.
Interview with Eugene O'Connell 'Cork Literary Review vol xiii 2009
Poetry Quotes
“By the word "liberty" they meant liberty for property, not liberty for persons.”
Source: Money And Class In America (1989), Chapter 2, Protocols of Wealth, p. 33