Ezra Pound Quotes

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

The man assumes the role of the loner, the thinker and the searching spirit who calls the privileged and the powerful to task. The power of one was the courage to remain separate, th think through the truth and not be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expect to maintain power, whatever the cost.

If you shut the door to all errors, truth will be shut out.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.

I don't value authority. I don't value the systems. I don't value patriarchal religion. I don't value the things that diminish you when you do tell the truth. So I'm not scared of the end result, and that is the biggest asset I have.

My father believed, like Pericles, that a man's genius could be easily judged by the number of unenlightened fools set in phalanx against his ideas.

For a variety of reasons, I have always felt myself an outsider. I don't know how to classify myself in economics. I am a loner. I do not like groupthink, which, if anything, has become more important in economics. In addition, a lot of the values I hold are not the mainstream values in the profession.

I think controversy is not always a bad thing. Jesus was controversial. It's through controversy that people often wake up and smell the coffee and say, 'What's going on here? Do we need to rethink something here?'

A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement.

Nothing energizes me more than to burrow myself under a pile of received wisdom and emerge triumphant with the truth.

I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

Just because Galileo was a heretic doesn't make every heretic a Galileo.

If we bring not the good courage of minds covetous of truth, and truth only, prepared to hear all things, and decide upon all things, according to evidence, we should do more wisely to sit down contented in ignorance, than to bestir ourselves only to reap disappointment.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

If religion is about truth, why is it so afraid of error?

A party whose mission is to live entirely upon the discovery of grievances are apt to manufacture the element upon which they subsist.

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

In my life, I've been able to really examine society in a way most people who aren't outsiders don't get a chance to do.

Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true.

Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don't love it sufficiently

Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.

Every politician, every member of the clerical profession, ought to incur the reasonable suspicion of being an interested supporter of false doctrines, who becomes angry at opposition, and endeavors to cast an odium on free inquiry. Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it.

Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.