Richard Huelsenbeck Quotes

That is the lavender landscape Herr Mayer was talking about
when he lost his eye
Only the fire department can drive the nightmare from the drawing-
room but all the hoses are broken...

Dada hurts. Dada does not jest, for the reason that it was experienced by revolutionary men and not by philistines who demand that art be a decoration for the mendacity of their own emotions.. .I am firmly convinced that all art will become dadaistic in the course of time, because from Dada proceeds the perpetual urge for its renovation.

The professors of zoology gather in the meadows
With the palms of their hands they turn back the rainbows
the great magician sets the tomatoes on his forehead
Again thou hauntest castle and grounds
The roebuck whistles the stallion bounds
(And this is how the world is this is all that's ahead of us)

The dissection of words into sounds is contrary to the purpose of language and applies musical principles to an independent realm whose symbolism is aimed at a logical comprehension of one’s environment.. ..the value of language depends on comprehensibility rather than musicality

I hold peace and war in my toga but I'l take a cherry flip
Today nobody knows whether he was tomorrow
They beat time with a coffin lid
If somebody had the nerve to rip the tail feathers
out of the trolley car it's a great age...

The cows sit on the telegraph poles and play chess
The cockatoo under the skirts of the Spanish dancer
Sings as sadly as a headquarters bugler and the cannon lament all day...

As Arp and I are sitting in the large living room of my house on Central Park in November 1958, we try again and again to understand the significance of Dada for ourselves and for others. Many elements surfaced in me and in the 'Fantastic Prayers' [his poems Phantastische Gebete, Zurich 1916] at the same time; resistance against the 'civilization' we live in, fury about a purely factual world which leaves out personality and thus creative power, the means of irony and underlying religiousness. Ball turned religious during the times of dadaism, Arp is a religious person today, and I have always been one, without wanting to realize it, perhaps without knowing it.

Have you seen the fish that have been standing in front of the
opera in cutaways
for the last two days and nights..?
Ah ah ye great devils – ah ah ye keepers of bees and commandments
With a bow wow wow with a bow woe woe who does today not know
what our Father Homer wrote...

[ Tinguely is a] Meta-Dadaist... [who had] fulfilled certain ideas of ours, notably the idea of motion.

There is a difference between sitting quietly in Switzerland [Dada in Zurich] and bedding down on a vulcano, as we did in Berlin.