George Ezra Quotes

When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the’ change of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system.

Only one mistake, Ezra! You should have talked to women.

Yes, but bad language is bound to make in addition bad government, whereas good language is not bound to make bad government. That again is clear Confucius: if the orders aren’t clear they can’t be carried out. Lloyd George’s laws were such a mess, the lawyers never knew what they meant. And Talleyrand proclaimed that they changed the meaning of words between one conference and another. The means of communication breaks down, and that of course is what we are suffering now. We are enduring the drive to work on the subconscious without appealing to the reason. They repeat a trade name with the music a few times, and then repeat the music without it so that the music will give you the name. I think of the assault. We suffer from the use of language to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers. There is the definite use of propaganda, forensic language, merely to conceal and mislead.

A bison pelt that Ezra had no interest in lined the wall behind his desk, for as he’d told George once, other men liked such things, and their comfort was paramount to assuring him their business.

Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized; George Packer’s Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal; Evan Osnos’s Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury; Yascha Mounk’s The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure; Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman’s Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy; Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die; Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart; and Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. I also suggest you read the January/February 2022 issue of the Atlantic. For contrast, and decidedly more upbeat, is Robert Putnam’s The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. The public hearings held by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol should be required viewing and are readily available online.

to the end: four fat oxen having their arses wiped and in general being tidied up to serve god under my window with stoles of Imperial purple with tassels, and grooms before the carroccio on which carroch six lion heads to receive the wax offering Thus arrive the gold eagles, the banners of the contrade, and boxes of candles ‘Mn-YAWWH!!!’ Said the left front ox, suddenly, ‘pnAWH!’ as they tied on his red front band, St George, two hokey-pokey stands and the unicorn ‘Nicchio! Nicch-iO-né!!’ The kallipygous Sienese females get that way from the salite that is from continual plugging up hill One box marked ‘200 LIRE’ ‘laudate pueri’ alias serve God with candles with the Palio and 17 banners and when six men had hoisted up the big candle a bit askew in the carroch and the fore ox had been finally arse-wiped they set off toward the Duomo, time consumed 1 hour and 17 minutes.

breaking of the celebratory mood. For George Kearns, one of the most perceptive of Pound’s readers,

Partisans are the ones George Washington warned us of in his farewell address. They: put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.