Yes, I know, we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed su — Stéphane Mallarmé

"Jinvente une langue qui doit nécessairement jaillir dune poétique très nouvelle, que je pourrais définir en ces deux mots: Peindre, non la chose, mais leffet quelle produit."

"It is in front of the paper that the artist creates himself."

"Hyperbole! can you not rise In triumph from my memory, A modern magic spell devise As from an ironbound grammary: For I inaugurate through science The hymn of all hearts spiritual In the labor of my patience, Atlas, herbal, ritual."

"La chair est triste, hélas! et jai lu tous les livres."

"O Spirit of litigation, know, When we keep silent in this season, The stem of multiple lilies grew Too large to be contained by reason"

"Degas was discussing poetry with Mallarmé; "It isnt ideas Im short of... Ive got too many" [Ce ne sont pas les idées qui me manquent... Jen ai trop], said Degas. "But Degas," replied Mallarmé, "you cant make a poem with ideas. … You make it with words." [Mais, Degas, ce nest point avec des idées que lon fait des vers. . . . Cest avec des mots.]"

"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."

"Todays paper with its columns of description of the new era, the atomic era, which this colossal slaughter of the innocents has ushered in, is filled with stories covering every conceivable phase of the new discovery."

"Today, you are hated throughout the world. If you dont know this, you should. The peoples burn your flag. The Islamic peoples all over the world chant: "Death to America!"