April 1

This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three

hundred and sixty-four.

-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"

You're at the end of the road again.

"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though

ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak,

mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers,

thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams has

moved amid the world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust,

and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate

earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful

water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or

diver never went; has slept by many a sailer's side, where sleepless mothers

would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when

leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting

wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the

murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell

into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed

on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would

have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou has

seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one

syllable is thine!"

-- H. Melville, "Moby Dick"

After all, it means thirteen dollars per month, three meals a day, and a place to sleep. Yet even necessity is not sufficiently strong a factor to bring into the army an element of character and manhood.

-- Emma Goldman

Stability means we run it. There are countries that are very stable. Cuba is stable, but that's not called stability.

-- Noam Chomsky

Unfortunately, a preoccupation with technical size, scale, and even artistry deflects our attention away from the most significant problems of technics -- notably, its ties with the ideals and social structures of freedom.

-- Murray Bookchin

While governments are subjected to the principle of free experimentation, to free competition, they will improve and perfect themselves on their own. No more aloofness, up in the clouds, which only hides their emptiness. Success for them will entirely depend upon them doing it better and cheaper than the others do.

-- Max Nettlau

Do not overtax your powers.

The Cold War serves as a useful device for the managers of American society and their counterparts in the Soviet Union to control their own populations and their own respective imperial systems.

-- Noam Chomsky

It is not another state that men aim at, but their union, uniting, this ever-fluid uniting of everything standing.

-- Max Stirner

As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is

nothing but cabbage with a college education.

-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"

I've touch'd the highest point of all my greatness;

And from that full meridian of my glory

I haste now to my setting. I shall fall,

Like a bright exhalation in the evening

And no man see me more.

-- Shakespeare

To go towards freedom, it becomes necessary to develop our individuality.

-- Albert Libertad

Slow day. Practice crawling.

If all our comrades of Europe, America and other countries, who do not understand what we are doing to Spanish anarchism, would come to Spain, we could then see how they would react.

-- Frederica Montseny

In the stairway of life, you'd best take the elevator.

You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here.

Without doubt, conventional right, contract and law, even universally and directly exercised, is not natural right, or justice. It is a compromise between anarchy and authority, and everything that is not completely just is injustice.

-- Joseph Dejacque

Leninism constitutes, without any doubt, a return to the revolutionary spirit of Marxism, but it also constitutes a return to the fallacies and abstractions of Marxist metaphysics.

-- Camillo Berneri