Dagger (42.5 cm) with skeleton/death hilt, France 19th c.

Mario De Biasi. Pattinatori (Skaters), 1953

In the film’s opening scene, Vito is famously seen holding a cat. Amazingly this was a stray that Coppola found while on the lot at Paramount Pictures, and was not originally called for in the script. So content was the cat that its purring muffled some of Brando’s dialogue and, as a result, most of his lines had to be looped.

"Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living- because cognition gives them more than they can carry? Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness."

- Peter Wessel Zapffe

Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie (1962)

Le Manteau d’Ernst Jünger, 2011 by Michel Aubry

Michael Rougier, Tokyo, 1964

“Small people need small virtues, and because I find it hard to accept that, small people are needed.”

—F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Part Three, “On Virtue That Makes Small,” §2 (excerpt).

Chechen fighter and Battle of Grozny veteran Musa Baskhanov, nicknamed "Cyborg", sometime during the First Chechen War (1994-1996)

Inmate at Eastham Prison, Houston,Texas, 1986.

The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.

— Gustave Le Bon

“Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.”