Émile Armand

“ Morals, sensations, rules of behavior, emotions, knowledges, faculties, opinions, passions, meaning, the brain, etc. — so many means that can allow us to approach our life. So many servants at the command of the “self” for it to develop and expand. Mastering them all, the conscious “negator of authority” does not allow himself to be mastered by any of them. When he succumbs, it is from lack of education of the will. This is not irreparable. The studied “one-beyond-domination” is not fearful; he enjoys everything, bites into everything, within the limits of individual appreciation. ”

“ Nor is feeling alive to perform the acts of one’s life within a narrow design, in line with some wise book written by some author who knows nothing of life but its hallucinations, crucibles, and equations. To feel alive is certainly not to keep to neatly graveled paths in a public garden when the capricious trails of wild undergrowth are calling out to you. ”

“ The walls are plastered with posters of every color where people claim to be of every flag, every “color” of opinion. Who doesn’t have his party, his program, his profession of faith? Who is not either a socialist, a radical, a progressive, a liberal, or a “proportionalist” — the newest fad? ”

“ All of this with no constraints, with no program imposed in advance; according to one’s temperament, then, to one’s state of being in the moment, one’s conception of life.
III. One can think oneself an anarchist and vegetate. One can mirror the anarchism of one’s newspaper, one’s favorite writer, one’s group. One can call oneself original and deep down be nothing more than a second- or third-degree add-on or outsider. ”