“That there is no solution to the decisive problems of human existence outside proletarian revolution is, for surrealism, a first principle that is beyond argument. Nothing would be more difficult than reconciling surrealism to bourgeois culture. I know that everything continues normally today, as yesterday, as if life were an IOU punctuated now and then with a yawn, a shrug of the shoulders or a punch in the nose. Immobilised beneath a seemingly inflexible net of counterfeit hopes and fears — hopeless and fearless at the same time before a destiny that could hardly be more ruinous in the free development of human personality — men and women go on fabricating illusory foresight and pitiful afterthoughts as if nothing more important were at stake than the price of cigarettes. But in this grim charade, fortunately, nothing is foolproof. A split second is sufficient to say no, to let the lions escape, to open the wounds of reality, to stop the assembly line, to set out for the unknown. Accidents do happen. With surrealism the phoenix of anticipation emerges unfailingly from the ashes of everyday distraction rising defiantly on wings of vitriol and amber, putting to shame the musty compromises that provide the glue with which the existing agony adheres to so many passing thoughts. Dispelling the mirage of futility, traversing the mirror of fatality, surrealism is resolved to stop at nothing.
“It cannot be emphasised too strongly: Surrealism is a unitary project of total revolution, is above all a method of knowledge and a way of life; it is lived far more than it is written, or written about, or drawn. Surrealism is the most exhilarating adventure of the mind, an unparalleled means of pursuing the fervent quest for freedom and true life beyond the veil of ideological appearances. Only the social revolution — the leap, in the celebrated expression, of Marx and Engels, ‘from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom’ — will enable the true life of poetry and mad love to cast aside, definitely, the fetters of degradation and dishonour and to flourish with unrestrained splendour. Vainly will one search in surrealism for a motive inconsistent with this fundamental aspiration.”
— Franklin Rosemont