Filippo Marinetti -- Futurist Manifesto

Embracing a vision of the future centered on technology, with a heavy dose of absurdism and a deep desire to shake Italy out of what he saw as the near-death torpor of "tradition", Filippo Marinetti flung down a provocative, unsettling, feverishly poetic gauntlet: 

It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.