Some Notes on Lifemanship (1950) p. 43.
This versatile gambit for disconcerting one's opponent in debate is usually said to have been originated by Potter, even though he had himself said in a footnote to Lifemanship that "I am required to state that World Copyright of this phrase is owned by its brilliant inventor, Mr. Pound". On publication of Lifemanship the critic Richard Usborne wrote to Potter protesting that this stratagem had been invented not by the mysterious Mr. Pound but by Usborne himself, in an article called "Not in the South" published in the May 28, 1941 number of Punch magazine, where the phrase was described as "a formula that let me off the boredom of finding out facts and retaining knowledge". Potter replied, "My God, have I got it wrong? I now perceive with horrifying clearness that I have", but he never corrected the attribution in print. The whole story was set out by Usborne in a letter published in Time magazine, January 5, 1970. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,943107-4,00.html
Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You
The Rum Tum Tugger
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)
Source: The Time Axis (1949), Ch. 25 : Return Voyage
Context: This isn't my world, now. Not any more. Not the world I left. This is a world in which no nekronic flash leaped from a box that Ira De Kalb opened and dropped to his hearthstone to infect the world, De Kalb and me. All that did happen once, in another world that hasn't existed since the four of us, a doubled weapon wielded by the Face of Ea, wrought the cleaving apart of two universes.
Imponderable forces shifted when that cleavage took place. You and I know nothing about it, for it happened far beyond the perceptions of any sentient creature. But it happened. Oh yes, it happened.
Lila (1991)
Context: Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible.
“What do any of us really know about love?”
Why I Am An Agnostic (1929)
Context: An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths. Everyone is an agnostic as to the beliefs or creeds they do not accept. Catholics are agnostic to the Protestant creeds, and the Protestants are agnostic to the Catholic creed. Any one who thinks is an agnostic about something, otherwise he must believe that he is possessed of all knowledge. And the proper place for such a person is in the madhouse or the home for the feeble-minded. In a popular way, in the western world, an agnostic is one who doubts or disbelieves the main tenets of the Christian faith.
“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”
“Only you can do something about it.
There's no-one there, my friend, any better.”
Song lyrics, 50 Words for Snow (2011)
"Intervention In Syria is a Moral and Human Imperative", New Republican (February 24, 2012)
