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

If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

From the colour the nature And by the nature the sign! Beatific spirits welding together As in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.

Don’t be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry.

A little light, like a rushlight to lead back to splendour.

The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

Hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody’s fine feelings may be offended.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

There are things they tell us that sound good to hear, but when they have accomplished their purpose they will go home and will not try to fulfill our agreements with them.

Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also.

If I agree to dispose of any part of our land to the white people I would feel guilty of taking food away from our children’s mouths, and I do not wish to be that mean.

The beginning of thought is in disagreement – not only with others but also with ourselves.

I could really try new things. That was satanism, it works really well, I made a pact.

Whether we are New Dealer, Old Dealer, Liberty Leaguer or Red, whether we agree or not, we still have the right to think and speak how we feel.