The No Committee

From the fine folks of AMERICA

What do I care for your laws now? What are your customs to me? Your morals, your life, your state, your faith? Let your judges judge me. Let me be brought before your courts, before your public courts, and I will declare that I do not recognize anything.

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

I acknowledge no judge, no law, no forbidden thing. All is permissible. Can you imagine a world, having no laws of gravitation, having no above nor below, in which everything is a matter of whim and chance? I am that new world. All is permissible. And I shall prove that. I will simulate normality. I will attain freedom. I will spend the remainder of my life in learning. I will surround me with your books. I will take from you all the might of your knowledge, of which you are so proud, and will seek the one thing of which the world has stood in need for so long a time. That will be the explosive essence. The equal of its force has not been seen: it is more powerful than dynamite, than nitroglycerin, more powerful than the very thought of it. I possess talent, I am persistent, I will find it. And when I do find it, I shall scatter in the air your accursed earth, which has so many gods and not one eternal God.

– Leonid Andreyev

We must preserve liberty while waiting for a fresh historical impulse which may allow us to engage it in a popular movement without ambiguity.

– Maurice Merleau-Ponty

As one jolted over the pavement or read last week’s newspapers, the new man seemed close at hand, for the old one had plainly reached the end of his strength and his failure had become catastrophic. Everyone saw it, and every municipal election shrieked chaos. A traveler in the highways of history looked out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come or how it was to act. The two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.

Having nothing else to do, the traveler went on to Washington to wait the end.

– Henry Adams

We certainly do need a new revelation – a new system – for there seems to be no life in the old one.

– Nathaniel Hawthorne

Wanting to believe in a national credo , we have found ourselves declining to accept one that seems more and more self-evidently composed of eupeptic half-truths. Consequently our most perceptive minds have distinguished themselves from our popular spokesmen by concentrating upon the dark other half of the situation, and their distinctive attitude has been introspection, dissent or irony. Where the voice of the majority is by definition affirmative, the spirit of independence is likeliest to manifest itself by employing the negative: by saying no in thunder – as Melville wrote to Hawthorne – though bidden by the devil himself to say yes.

– Harry Levin

I had no desire to destroy myself even if it destroyed the machine; I wanted freedom, not destruction. I was exhausted, for no matter what the scheme I conceived, there was one constant flaw – myself. There was no getting around it. I could no more escape than I could think of my identity. Perhaps, I thought, the two things are involved with each other. When I discover who I am, I’ll be free,

– Ralph Ellison

It is the duty of intellectuals to commit suicide as a class.

– Che Guevara

I was not born to be forced.

– Henry David Thoreau

Man is an abyss you get dizzy looking into.

– Georg Buchner

Oliver despised the rich and disliked the poor and drank to the bloody extinction of the middle classes.

– Elizabeth Bowen

I also like to watch the birds, animals and children, and to think how fortunate I am they are not mine.

– Stevie Smith

Michael was begging for a paring knife in the stomach.

– Andrea Cross

Cody: …in fact, he’s so relaxed and normal that…he can be a drag, you know what I mean?

Jack: (laughing) Yeah.

– Jack Kerouac

Gradually she became an ordinary good lady, that is a woman who in herself is good, but has reconciled herself to banality and accommodated herself to vegetative life.

– Chernyshevsky

"Everyone in the whole country who’s out of line is going to learn fear and that’ll be very shortly."

"There are some people who are going to learn fear and there are some people who are going to unlearn it," Rainey said. "And that’ll be very shortly."

– Robert Stone

Gimme a cigarette. Give the anarchist a cigarette.

– Bob Dylan

What makes me run? I burn, damn it, that’s why I like to run.

– F. Lee Bailey