The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.

where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.

USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.