Top 180 Ezra Pound Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”

— Ezra Pound

2. “Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a ‘country run by Jews,’”

— Ezra Pound

Featured in: Country Quotes

3. “America is a lunatic asylum.”

— Ezra Pound

4. “The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.”

— Ezra Pound

5. “If a man isn’t willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good.”

— Ezra Pound

6. “Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”

— Ezra Pound

Featured in: Reading Quotes

7. “Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.”

— Ezra Pound

8. “Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d’Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.”

— Ezra Pound

9. “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”

— Ezra Pound

Featured in: Reading Quotes

10. “The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.”

— Ezra Pound

11. “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.”

— Ezra Pound

12. “And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass.”

— Ezra Pound

13. “Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”

— Ezra Pound

14. “Either move or be moved.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

16. “Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.”

— Ezra Pound

17. “I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.”

— Ezra Pound

18. “In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.”

— Ezra Pound

19. “The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.”

— Ezra Pound

20. “The temple is holy because it is not for sale.”

— Ezra Pound

21. “Literature is news that stays news.”

— Ezra Pound

Featured in: Reading Quotes

22. “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.”

— Ezra Pound

23. “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.”

— Ezra Pound

24. “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.”

— Ezra Pound

25. “Wars are made to make debt.”

— Ezra Pound

26. “Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

28. “The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

30. “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.”

— Ezra Pound

31. “Every great change is simple.”

— Ezra Pound

32. “With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.”

— Ezra Pound

Featured in: Reading Quotes

33. “Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.”

— Ezra Pound

34. “The artist is the antenna of the race.”

— Ezra Pound

35. “Make-strong old dreams lest this our world lose heart.”

— Ezra Pound

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

— Ezra Pound

37. “Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.”

— Ezra Pound

38. “Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time.”

— Ezra Pound

39. “Presentation, not reference...”

— Ezra Pound

40. “What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.”

— Ezra Pound

41. “It doesn’t matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.”

— Ezra Pound

42. “To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.”

— Ezra Pound

43. “Glance is the enemy of vision.”

— Ezra Pound

44. “The natural object is always the adequate symbol.”

— Ezra Pound

45. “I have weathered the storm, I have beaten out my exile.”

— Ezra Pound

46. “No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot ‘handle the class.’ Real education must ultimately be limited to men how INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.”

— Ezra Pound

47. “A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.”

— Ezra Pound

48. “The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.”

— Ezra Pound

49. “America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.”

— Ezra Pound

Featured in: Country Quotes

50. “Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.”

— Ezra Pound