The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

— Ezra Pound

The Garden En robe de parade. - Seamanlike a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piecemeal a sort of emotional anemia. And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth. In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like someone to speak to her, And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.

— Ezra Pound

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised literati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

— Ezra Pound

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

— Ezra Pound

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight

— Ezra Pound

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

— Ezra Pound

Two mystic states can be dissociated: the ecstatic-beneficent-and-benevolent, contemplation of the divine love, the divine splendor with goodwill toward others. And the bestial, namely the fanatical, the man on fire with God and anxious to stick his snotty nose into other men's business or reprove his neighbor for having a set of tropisms different from that of the fanatic's, or for having the courage to live more greatly and openly. The second set of mystic states is manifest in scarcity economists, in repressors etc. The first state is a dynamism. It has, time and again, driven men to great living, it has given them courage to go on for decades in the face of public stupidity. It is paradisiacal and a reward in itself seeking naught further... perhaps because a feeling of certitude inheres in the state of feeling itself. The glory of life exists without further proof for this mystic.

— Ezra Pound

Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.

— Ezra Pound

Utter originality is of course out of the question.

— Ezra Pound

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

— Ezra Pound