The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism 1908

We intend to glorify the love of danger, the custom of energy, the strength of daring.

The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolt.

Literature having up till now glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and slumber, we wish to exalt the aggressive movement, the fervish insomnia running, the perilous leap, the cuff, and the blow.

We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched with new forms of beauty, the beauty of speed. A race automobile adorned with great pipes like serpents with explosive breath...a race automobile which seems to rush over exploding powder is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrice.

We will sing the praise of man holding the flywheel of which the ideal steering post traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit of its own orbit.

The poet must spend himself with warmth, brilliance, and prodigality to augment the fervor of the primordial elements.

There is no more beauty except in struggle. No masterpiece without the stamp of aggressiveness. Poetry should be a violent assault against unknown forces to summon them to lie down at the feet of man.

We are on the extreme promontory of ages! Why look back since we must break down the door of impossibility? Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute for we have already created the omnipresent eternal speed.

We will glorify war --- The only true hygiene of the world --- militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman.

We will destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice.
We will sing the great masses agitated by work, pleasure, or revolt ; we will sing the multicolored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitols; the nocturnal vibration of arsenals and docks beneath their glaring electric moons; greedy stations devouring smoking serpents; factories hanging by the threads of their smoke; bridges like giant gymnasts stepping over sunny rivers sparkling like diabolical cutlery; adventurous steamers scenting the horizon; large breasted locomotives bridled with long tubes and the slippery flight of airplanes whose propellers have flaglike flutterings and applause of enthusiastic crowds.

It is in Italy that we hurl this overthrowing and inflammation declaration, with which today we found FUTURISM, for we will free Italy from her numberless museums which cover her with countless cemeteries. Museums, cemeteries!... Identical truly,

WE PROCLAIM

1-that an inherent complimentarity is as necessary to painting as vers libre to poetry or polyphony to music

2-That the universal dynamism must be rendered as dynamic sensation

3-that in the interpretation of nature the must be sincerity and chastity

4- That light and motion destroy the solidity of objects

WE COMBAT

1 Patina and the obscurity of false antiques

2 Superficial archaism...

3 False Futurists, secessionists and independents, the new academics of every country

4 The nude in painting, just as tiresome and depressing as adultery in literature.

"We are all merely lighting effects"

"The sixteen people around you in a tram are successively one, ten, four, three they hold still momentarily, but then they shift again, coming and going with the swaying and the bouncing on the tram... persistent symbols of universal motion."