A few points of that manifesto:
We shall sing of the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness. Literature has hitherto glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy of sleep; we shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff.
There is no more beauty except in strife. We wish to glorify war—the only purifier of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the beauty of Ideas that kill, the contempt for women.
We wish to destroy the museums, the libraries, to fight against moralism and feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian meannesses.
This bombastic program has been heralded by the Italian Futurists ever since 1909. Fortunately they went no further than threats, but they strove to attract attention and in this they gloriously succeeded.
Their attitude toward women was expressed in the motto: “Méprisez la femme.” Love for woman is an atavism and should be discarded into archives.
We chant hymns to the new beauty that has come into the world in our days, a hymn to swiftness, a doxology to motion.
Woman is justified in her existence inasmuch as she is a prostitute. Sensuality for the sake of sensuality is extolled as the only stimulus in human life,—its only aim. Otherwise human beings are of no importance, at best as important as inanimate objects.
The suffering of a man is of the same interest to us as the suffering of an electric lamp, which, with spasmodic starts, shrieks out the most heart-rending expressions of color.
These aphorisms belong to the pen of Marinetti or to those of his disciples, who are but pigmies in comparison with their leader. They greeted the war with Turkey in Tripolitania enthusiastically, and Marinetti joyously witnessed the splendor of “bayonets piercing human bodies” and similar features of the great “health-giver”—war. At that time he began the cycle of his pictorial poems recently published in the Words at Liberty. Here is one of his early descriptions: