> Anyone who doesn't want to belong to the mass need only cease to go easy on themselves; let them follow their conscience, which cries out to them "Be yourself! You are none of those things that you now do, think, and desire." Every young soul hears this call night and day and trembles, for when it thinks of its true liberation, it has an inkling of the measure of happiness for which it is destined from eternity. As long as it is shackled by the chains of opinion and fear, nothing can help it attain this happiness. And how bleak and senseless this life can become without this liberation!

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

> Do not preach the straight and narrow way while going joyously upon the wide one. Preach the wide one, or do not preach at all; but do not fool yourself by saying you would like to help usher in a free society, but you cannot sacrifice an armchair for it. Say honestly, "I love arm-chairs better than free men, and pursue them because I choose; not because circumstances make me. I love hats, large, large hats, with many feathers and great bows; and I would rather have those hats than trouble myself about social dreams that will never be accomplished in my day. The world worships hats, and I wish to worship with them."

> But if you choose the liberty and pride and strength of the single soul, and the free fraternization of men, as the purpose which your life is to make manifest then do not sell it for tinsel. Think that your soul is strong and will hold its way; and slowly, through bitter struggle perhaps the strength will grow. And the foregoing of possessions for which others barter the last possibility of freedom will become easy.

> At the end of life you may close your eyes saying: "I have not been dominated by the Dominant Idea of my Age; I have chosen mine own allegiance, and served it. I have proved by a lifetime that there is that in man which saves him from the absolute tyranny of Circumstance, which in the end conquers and remoulds Circumstance, the immortal fire of Individual Will, which is the salvation of the Future."

-- Voltairine de Cleyre

I once read a story in our school text book, I wish I knew the author. It was about some new kind of prison without walls, but instead prisoners had an implant that gave them increasing shocks up to incapacitating them if they moved too far away from the prison. This one prisoner kept trying to escape, at one point getting so far that a truck driver brought him to a doctor, who then called the police IIRC, and at the end, the prison director was talking to the prisoner, asking why do you keep trying, you know it's absolutely impossible, why not just accept it? And the prisoner said, because when I accept it, you won. Right now, I win. We never read that story in class, but it impressed the fuck out of me. Life is short and fickle either way, might as well live it as me, right? And if everybody saved themselves, maybe the world would be saved, but even if the world goes to shit, I can still save myself. That is, only I can ruin myself. I can be shut up, but I can't be made to say "yes". I can't say that's good enough, but that's a good start.

> Finally, it is the act itself that matters. When instrumental reason is the sole guide to action, the acts it justifies are robbed of their inherent meanings and thus exist in an ethical vacuum. I recently heard an officer of a great university publicly defend an important policy decision he had made, one that many of the university's students and faculty opposed on moral grounds, with the words: "We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?" But the moral good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility.

-- Joseph Weizenbaum, "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation" (1976)

And while punk may be generally dead, as long as it still exists in China, nobody is allowed to give up! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk4EspwLpzc

Godspeed to you. Or as that one scroller text in an Amiga demo said: grab life by the balls, like a ninja!