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Agitprop
              sticks
                        in my teeth too,
and I'd rather
                    compose
                                   romances for you –
more profit in it
                      and more charm.
But I
          subdued
                         myself,
                                    setting my heel
on the throat
                    of my own song.
--
"At the Top of My Voice" (1929-30); translation from Patricia Blake (ed.) The Bedbug and Selected Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975) pp. 223-5

 

Vladimir Mayakovsky

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I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.

 

William Butler Yeats

 

He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature, and it's a great shame that the word for it has been thoroughly debased by the cosmetic racketeers, so that one is almost ashamed to use it to describe a real distinction. Nevertheless, the word is charm — charm as Keats would have used it. Who has it today? It's not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It's a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartettes.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.

 

Dmitri Shostakovich

 

Well, we do not do this so that other players can make profit. We've actually been doing this for a long time and I do not know of anyone who specifically makes money off OpenBSD. They may, at best, save some money by not having to re-engineer the same software that we have already written. It is not exactly that we are letting them make a profit, but that we are doing a proper job and saving someone else from having to do the same job in a corporate setting. In our eyes, that is perhaps a waste of planet-wide engineer talents, rewriting the same thing over and over. Why can’t we just get it right once?

 

Theo de Raadt

 

Light-heel'd Mothers make leaden-heel'd Daughters.

 

Thomas (writer) Fuller