Sublime

“There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. For fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live and work under fascism.”

Percy Shelley in “A Defense of Poetry,”

« Et moi, se dit-il, moi, l’intellect européen, que vais-je devenir ?... Et qu’est-ce que la paix ? La paix est peut-être, l’état de choses dans lequel l’hostilité naturelle des hommes entre eux se manifeste par des créations, au lieu de se traduire par des destructions comme fait la guerre. C’est le temps d’une concurrence créatrice, et de la lutt

‘It’s not a matter of reason or justice. We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out. War and Love—they have always been compared.’

The artist is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society — the politicians, legislators, educators, and scientists — by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own laboratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all t

What is vitally needed everywhere, in art as much as in ethics, in poetry as much as in politics, is choice; a creative power in the will as well as in the mind. Without that self–limitation of somebody, nothing living will ever see the light.

And an even stronger example of Mr. Wells's indifference to the human psychology can be found in his cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of all patriotic boundaries. He says in his innocent way that Utopia must be a world-state, or else people might make war on it. It does not seem to occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it were a

Weaver was a professor of rhetoric.