We not only went after some sacred cows, we went after the whole herd.
We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today.
But in philosophy, sometimes the baby ought to go out with the bath water.
Questioning the status quo can result in banishment, imprisonment, ridicule or being burned at the stake, depending on your era, your locale, and the sacred cows you wish to butcher.
By a series of violent shocks, the nations in succession have struggled to shake off the Past, to reverse the action of Time and the verdict of success, and to rescue the world from the reign of the dead.
Why should we hesitate to toss the old views overboard.
A new society cannot be created by reproducing the repugnant past, however refined or enticingly repackaged.
How boring to copy the past -- with all the magnificence of today and tomorrow.
I don't think it's helpful to go dismantling the past, but you can refuse to honor aspects of it that you don't believe in anymore.
I guess I'm dedicated to breaking every inherited mould I can in my private life.
As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.
There've always been people in the borderland between childhood and adulthood. That state is not a matter of chronological age. It's a matter of understanding that you can accept a future that has been defined by the previous generation, or you can reject it and make something new.
Hardly any generation wants to take the whole of the last generation, it just wants to take its best bits.
Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom.
It means so much to me that my family went against our tradition for me.
The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the past
This is something that, as artists, we constantly deal with-throwing away the past, slaying the father, and creating the new. This desire to throw away the old rules.
I don't like traditions, I am very personal, very independent, I don't like intimate ladies, I mean in German lieder there's a lot of copy, a lot of imitation, a lot of tradition, and this I have put it aside.
I hate this image of me as a prim Edwardian. I want to shock everyone.
By despising all that has preceded us, we teach others to despise ourselves.
