Wyndham Lewis Quotes

Sex was really all bluff — power the thing.

The puritanic potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion, hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done in the name of "decency". The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things attended to.

Great Britain is certainly suspect to Americans. They cannot make head or tail of her. She is a stuck-up old girl who owes a lot of money - an odd thing for such a highly respectable old lady to do. She is rather flighty, which is alarming in one so old - she never seems quite serious, that is - goes into giggles all of a sudden, or smiles enigmatically, if politely. She seems to the average American slightly phoney. Let us face up to that. She has many habits which baffle and put one on one's guard - the curious way she has of speaking English with a foreign accent, for instance. Then she must be the most quarrelsome old dame which ever stepped: always - umbrella in hand - getting into scraps with her neighbours, and spitting at them over the garden wall.

I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo.

We have the immense background of War and of Revolution. That is enough — the blood is gratis! Both the soldier and the communist enrol themselves to murder — one under militarist rules, the other under marxist disciplines. But both are homicide-clubs, you call your victim "Hun", you call him "Bourgeois", it is all one — no, wars and communes have cheapened murder.

The modern man whether of Bloomsbury Baltimore or Berlin has vanquished vanity — he offers himself to his own inspection as the worm he turns out to be. If he is vain at all, and it must be conceded that self-love is hard to kill, it is about his humility. His own Vernichtung is his greatest pride the laying bare of the nullity, the Nichtigkeit, that is the 'self' at the heart of energy (which is merely the doctrine of Xt that 'he who humbleth himself shall be exalted' ! Be modest, protest you are nobody, a biological bagatelle and hi presto! you will get top-marks, and be given authority, that is the idea — it is the christian strategy. …)