"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.” 

A ground crew member from Electronic Attack Squadron VAQ-132 signals to an EA-18G Growler as it returns from a flight during heavy snows at Naval Air Facility Misawa, Japan. 10 Jan 2013

By contrast, the other person has no right to make the radical demand that everything that I say or do in our mutual relationship must be said and done for their sake rather than for my own ... The fact out of which the demand arises, namely that more or less of the other person's life is in my hands, has precisely come about without their participation or mine, and without them or me being able to chip in. Therefore, they cannot identify themselves with the - created - fact and make the demand their own.

- K.E. Løgstrup