Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
SALVADOR DALI, Declaration, 1929
What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust?
SALVADOR DALI, attributed, A Companion to Television
I categorically refused to consider the Surrealists as just another literary and artistic group. I believed they were capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the "practical, rational world." I was going to become the Nietzsche of the irrational. I, the obsessed rationalist, was the only one who knew what I wanted: I was not going to submit to irrationality for its own sake, to the narcissist and passive irrationality others practiced. I would do completely the opposite. I would fight for the 'conquest of the irrational'.
SALVADOR DALI, Diary of a Genius
The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.
SALVADOR DALI, Conversations with Dali
Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.
