Ism Quotes
The nice thing about an -ism, someone once observed, is how quickly it becomes a wasm. Some musical wasms-academic-wasm, for example, and its dependent varieties of modern-wasm and Serial-wasm-continue to linger on artifical life support, thought, and continue to threaten the increasingly fragile classical ecosystem.
Richard Taruskin
.. the art of futurism.... achieved great momentum in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century and remains a basic stimulus in the following forms of new art: Suprematism, Simultaneism, Purism, Odorism, Pankinetism, Tactilism, Haptism, Expressionism and Légerísm [referring to Fernand Léger in the last... ism, mentioned].
Kazimir Malevich
What fascinates me about Van Gogh is that his sun dries up everything. Maybe he was melodramatic but my point really is.... if you are a painter you have to face that self-consciousness. You get dirty and pathetic; very miserable. It makes me self-conscious to talk about it. There is something corrupt on art. Nothing do with any 'ism' but a thing in nature loses its innocence and becomes a grotesque thing.... maybe this difficulty is personal with me, and maybe it is something that other painters have in common. Perhaps it is also something of today.
Willem de Kooning
One needs a medium. The best is, one is his own medium. But don't be serious because seriousness belongs to a passed time. This medium, called you yourself will tell you to take absolutely the wrong material. That is very good, because only the wrong material used in the wrong way, will give the right picture, when you look at it from the right angle. Or the wrong angle. That leads us to the new ism: Anglism. The first art starting from England [the country of Schwitters' forced stay, when he wrote this quote], except the former shapes of art.
Kurt Schwitters
As soon as artistic activity turns into an 'ism', it ceases to be artistic activity. To be alive is to engage in a daily struggle for form and for survival. (By way of analogy: social concern is a form and a method that is currently seen as appropriate and right. But where it elevates itself into Socialism, an order and a dogma, then it loses its best and truest qualities and may turn criminal.)
Gerhard Richter
What vision must Negro writers have before their eyes in order to feel the impelling necessity for an about face? What angle of vision can show them all the forces of modern society in process, all the lines of economic development converging toward a distant point of hope? Must they believe in some `ism?
Richard Wright
Not believing in something is not in itself a belief or a philosophy: it is the 'ism' at the end that tends to cause the trouble. Both atheists and believers can be as arrogant and witless as each other in frustrated debate, and people may choose strong and unapologetic words to raise awareness of the agenda. But despite the name-calling, it is still a fair point that to not believe in God is no more a 'belief in itself' than to not believe in the Loch Ness Monster, Poseidon or anything else one might personally consider far-fetched. Beyond that, there is only how you choose to express yourself.
Derren Brown
Melissa McCarthy just opened this new movie, 'Identity Thief,' and Rex Reed, who's a known critic, wrote a scathing commentary on her weight. I think that weight designation is one of the last frontiers of bullying. I don't know what the right 'ism' for it is, but I think that there's a level of that that's happening that's certainly not okay.
Josh Gad
Democracy for most of us is not an ism. It is a way of life. It does not represent any rigid form of state or national organization. It is something constantly developing and unfolding, changing from day to day, making mistakes, advancing in this direction and retreating in that, but always animated by a few fundamental ideas: that men have a right to live their own lives, provided they don't tread too heavily on other people's toes;...
Dorothy Thompson
Like most inventors, Pound did not create out of the void. The "Image" he took from T.E. Hulme's table talk. The "ism" was suggested to him by the notes on contemporary French poetry which I wrote for Harold Monro's Poetry Review. The collacation of 'image' and 'ism' came to Pound after I had told him about Divoire's essays on stratégie littéraire.
F. S. Flint
Perhaps the lines of nationalism and factionalism and every other goddamn "ism” in the world had reduced the chances for this weary planet. Or not. Nuclear devices had existed for over a century, and only four of them had ever been used in anger. This could be interpreted as proof of divine intervention, good luck, a sign that the human race was growing up, or ominous portent, depending upon one's standing in the "half-empty, half-full” school of cocktail-party philosophy.
Larry Niven
What rot it is to talk about Socialism or any other ism when women are what they are! The only thing a woman ever wants is money; money for a house of her own and two babies and Drage furniture and an aspidistra. The only sin they can imagine is not wanting to grab money. No woman ever judges a man by anything except his income. Of course she doesn't put it to herself like that. She says he's such a nice man - meaning that he's got plenty of money. And if you haven't got money you aren't nice. You're dishonoured, somehow. You've sinned. Sinned against the aspidistra.
George Orwell
