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Post by deuce on Jul 20, 2017 10:42:22 GMT -5
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Post by deuce on Jul 31, 2017 16:45:35 GMT -5
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Post by deuce on Aug 25, 2017 10:53:40 GMT -5
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Post by deuce on Sept 12, 2017 9:24:41 GMT -5
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Post by deuce on Dec 6, 2017 13:48:27 GMT -5
"Concerning freedom and liberty: I don’t suppose that anybody ever said that man had 'complete' freedom. Terms are always relative — except when somebody takes refuge in philosophical completeness, if I may use a vague term. Naturally, man has always been bound by certain natural limitations, as he always will be. What is freedom for one man is not necessarily freedom for another.
The trouble is, as I pointed out awhile back — each man is likely to consider himself capable of determining just which amount of freedom, and what kind of freedom, is good for his neighbor. All men being subject to natural limitations, it is easy enough to take the philosophical stand that freedom is an illusion and never existed. By that means of argument you can prove the same of anything — including Art. Arguing from that standpoint, the writer who works five or six hours a day, or at least directs his work as he wishes, and toils at a congenial task, is as much a slave as a farm-hand pushing a plough through rocky ground from sunup to sundown. However, if it were suggested that these philosophers abandon their professions to gaze on a mule’s tail from dawn to dusk, a howl would go up that would shake the stars in their firmament. And if these persons were forced to work with their hands — or with their heads at some uncongenial task — for sixteen hours a day, they would speak most bitterly of serfdom and oppression, as if indeed, freedom and its lack did exist except in the minds of such romantic emotionalists as myself. Like most philosophical sophistry, it falls down when put to a material test. As for what constitutes real value in life, that is merely a matter of opinion, and however much one may feel that his particular values are the ones of real worth, he can not, or should not, expect people living under different conditions and in different environments, with different ways of thinking, to accept his standards without question."
-- Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, Sep/Oct 1933
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Post by deuce on Jan 16, 2018 9:11:53 GMT -5
"When a man overcomes all his primitive instincts and even stifles the fundamental instinct of self-preservation and sacrifices his life for another — that’s just as 'high' as art."
-- Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, Sep/Oct 1933
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Post by deuce on Jan 24, 2018 12:37:41 GMT -5
"Once men sang the praises of ephemeral gods carved out of ivory and wood. Now they sing equally senseless praises to equally ephemeral and vain gods of Science and Commerce and Progress. Hell."
-- Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, October 1931
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Post by deuce on Mar 15, 2018 10:07:19 GMT -5
"I am indeed sorry to learn of the deaths in your family. Death to the old is inevitable, and yet somehow I often feel that it is a greater tragedy than death to the young. When a man dies young he misses much suffering, but the old have only life as a possession and somehow to me the tearing of a pitiful remnant from weak old fingers is more tragic than the looting of a life in its full rich prime. I don’t want to live to be old. I want to die when my time comes, quickly and suddenly, in the full tide of my strength and health."
-- Robert E. Howard to August Derleth, 9 May 1936
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Post by deuce on Mar 28, 2018 10:45:55 GMT -5
"To hell with the psychologists and city-bred psychoanalysts and all the other freaks spawned by our rotting civilization. They’ve lived between concrete and shingles so long they’ve forgot their origin. They ought to get out before sun-up and walk through the grass barefooted some morning, just for an unfamiliar experience. I once wrote a rhyme in which I tried to express my resentment:
You have built a world of paper and wood, Culture and cult and lies; Has the cobra altered beneath his hood, Or the fire in the tiger’s eyes?
You have turned from valley and hill and flood, You have set yourselves apart, Forgetting the earth that feeds the blood And the talon that finds the heart.
You boast you have stilled the lustful call Of the black ancestral ape, But Life, the tigress that bore you all, Has never changed her shape.
And a strange shape comes to your faery mead, With a fixed black simian frown, But you will not know and you will not heed Till your towers come tumbling down.
I’ve forgotten the rest of it, which is doubtless as well."
-- Robert E. Howard to August Derleth, 9 May 1936
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Post by deuce on May 2, 2018 10:11:22 GMT -5
"My tastes and habits are simple; I am neither erudite nor sophisticated. I prefer jazz to classical music, musical burlesques to Greek tragedy, A. Conan Doyle to Balzac, Bob Service’s verse to Santayana’s writing, a prize fight to a lecture on art. I read the wood pulp magazines and enjoy them. I laugh uproariously at slap stick comedy in the movies. I respect men’s religion whether I believe in it or not. I am a 100% American and damned proud of it."
-- Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft July, 1933
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Post by Aryeh on May 3, 2018 2:44:52 GMT -5
"To hell with the psychologists and city-bred psychoanalysts and all the other freaks spawned by our rotting civilization. ..."
-- Robert E. Howard to August Derleth, 9 May 1936 That's... Funny. Considering how psychoanalysis is exactly the filed which strives to show by scientific means that humans are not that advanced as humans like to believe, and that sexuality, drive to kill, and everything else down that road which is considered to be 'base impulses', 'lower nature', etc., is still central to each human. Civilization is but a mask for psychoanalysis. When one reads Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents one finds oneself in REH's neighborhood, so to speak, in many important ways...
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Post by deuce on Sept 27, 2018 9:07:02 GMT -5
"From the time when the earth was too hot to support human life to the time when it will be too cold, will be a mere instant in the earth’s history, compared to the millions of years before and the millions of years after man’s complete disappearance from its face. Man is an elemental being, bound by the same basic and fundamental rules which bind all elements. He is cursed with a consciousness of Life, a blessing which is a curse, as are all such blessings. He realizes his inability to control his own destiny and he rebels. He demands a special creative act, a kinship to Deity, a life and an afterlife entirely different from the rest of earth’s creatures. He rants and he roars, he boasts and he shouts, but after all, after all his self glorifying, he dies and the chemicals in his body disintegrates back to the elements which produce him."
-- Robert E. Howard to Harold Preece, 1928
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Post by deuce on Jan 14, 2019 12:04:32 GMT -5
"I’ve often wondered if, in the legends and myths of the ancients that have come down to us through the ages, there does not exist a foundation of truth, twisted and distorted beyond recognition."
-- Robert E. Howard to Clark Ashton Smith March 1934
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Post by kemp on Jun 1, 2020 17:46:17 GMT -5
REH saw what was coming a decade into the future: "International convulsions and gigantic upheavals are hovering in the very air of the world. The richest countries in the world writhe in starvation while the rich folk go blindly to their own doom, like swine who are unaware that the muck they tread on is alive with waking serpents. The wings of Melek Taus hover over the world, the winds whisper of revolt, anarchy, war and red ruin for all the sons of men."
- Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, December 1930Deuce, I have scoured the web for that particular one, but can't seem to find any online links in relation to it, although I have found information aplenty elsewhere in regards to REH's other quotes on the subject of barbarism and civilisation. I thought I would ask you as I knew if anyone could find it it would be you, any idea where I might look, any possible links ?
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Post by linefacedscrivener on Jun 1, 2020 21:08:25 GMT -5
REH saw what was coming a decade into the future: "International convulsions and gigantic upheavals are hovering in the very air of the world. The richest countries in the world writhe in starvation while the rich folk go blindly to their own doom, like swine who are unaware that the muck they tread on is alive with waking serpents. The wings of Melek Taus hover over the world, the winds whisper of revolt, anarchy, war and red ruin for all the sons of men."
- Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, December 1930Deuce, I have scoured the web for that particular one, but can't seem to find any online links in relation to it, although I have found information aplenty elsewhere in regards to REH's other quotes on the subject of barbarism and civilisation. I thought I would ask you as I knew if anyone could find it it would be you, any idea where I might look, any possible links ? Hey Kemp. I found it as cited in the Collected Letters. It was written to Clyde Smith, believed to be December 5, 1930. Here is a bit more of the quote to give some context to what Howard was speaking to, particularly the issues on the horizon with WWII. "Great events are shaping themselves in the east. If any man is left to write the history of these times, he will have horrific tales to tell. People under-rate Russia. The potentialities of world-conquest lie in the minds and calloused hands of those mujiks. The whole world is quaking and rocking, and an undercurrent of insanity is bubbling and seething beneath the surface. Every time the wind blows out of the east I smell the reek of war in it. Nothing is stable now; we live in the midst of the Age of Change. International convulsions and gigantic upheavals are hovering in the very air of the world. The richest countries in the world writhe in starvation while the rich folk go blindly to their own doom, like swine who are unaware that the muck they tread on is alive with waking serpents. The wings of Melek Taus hover over the world, the winds whisper of revolt, anarchy, war and red ruin for all the sons of men. "Already Mussolini's feet are unsteady in Italy and last night France was without a government. In Scotland ninety thousand men go out on a strike, and social unreast spreads over the British Isles. In Russia men on trial for treason fling accusations at the powers of the world. And Italy is accused of forming secret alliances with Bulgaria, Turkey, Austria and Germany to overthrow the conditions imposed on them by defeat in the last war. Well, let the nations cut each other's throats, and let war sweep the planet clean. When its done we can all lie down in the grateful sleep of everlasting oblivion and the clean winds and the seas will erase from the poor old world the scars of mankind's existence." I hope that is what you were aiming for. Let me know if you need anything else.
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