One needs a medium. The best is, one is his own medium. But dont be se — Kurt Schwitters

"We, the founders of Dada-movement try to give time its own reflection in the mirror."

"When I was born 20.6.[18]87, I was influenced by Picasso to cry. When I could walk and speak I still stood under Picassos influence and said to my mother: Tom or Happening, meaning the entrances of the canal under the street. My lyrical time was when I lived in the Violet Street. I never saw a violet. That was my influence by Matisse because when he painted rose I did not paint violet. As a boy of ten I stood under Mondrians influence and built little houses with little bricks. Afterwards I stood under the influence of the Surrealists.. .I never stood under the influence of Dadaism because whereas the Dadaist created Spiegel-dadaismus (Mirror-Dada) on the Zurich Lake, I created MERZ on the Leine-river, under the influence of Rembrandt. Time went on, and when Hans Arp made concrete Art, I stayed Abstract. Now I do concrete Art, and Marcel Duchamp went over to the Surrealists.. ..and at all I have much fun about Art."

"Then we went down to his work room, in the horrible beautiful Merz grotto [Merz-Haus / MerzBau, built by Schwitters in Hannover as his studio], where broken wheels paired with matchboxes, wire lattices with brushes without bristles, rusted wheels with curious Merz cucumbers.. .How often did we p-lay in this room! Schwitters called playing, considering the sweat, working. There we glued [collages] together our paper pictures, and as I tossed away one of my glued-together works one morning, Schwitters asked, You dont like it? Can I have it? – What do you want with this failed piece of toast? Schwitters took a good look at it and said, Ill put whats on top on the bottom, Ill stick a little Merz nose in this corner and I’ll sign the bottom Kurt Schwitters. And, yes indeed, this collage became a wonderful picture by Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters was a wizard, just as Hokusai was a wizard."

"One of my first sculptures was made of bicycle parts. I was living at that time in a attic in the red light section of Amsterdam. I started to work without any specific materials. I was looking in the street, like when I was a young boy, in the garbage cans, for ropes, wires, and paint. I left my parents in 1940. Years later I saw an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam curated by w:Willem Sandberg and there I saw the real objet trouvé; until then I had never heard about it. Schwitters was a shattering experience."

"Classical poetry counts on peoples similarity. It regards idea associations as unequivocal. This is a mistake. In any case, it rests on a fulcrum of idea associations: Above the peaks is peace... .The poet counts on poetic feelings. And what is a poetic feeling? The whole poetry of peace / quiet stands or falls on the readers ability to feel. Words are not judged here."

"Since the loss of the Merzbau [his former studio in Hannover, which was a big sculpture (5 x 4 x 4,5 meters) I did a lot of small sculptures.."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"