Carol Apple

“Dear Hunger Games :

Screw you for helping cowards pretend you have to be great with a bow to fight evil.

You don't need to be drafted into a monkey-infested jungle to fight evil.

You don't need your father's light sabre, or to be bitten by a radioactive spider.

You don't need to be stalked by a creepy ancient vampire who is basically a pedophile if you're younger than a redwood.

Screw you mainstream media for making it look like moral courage requires hair gel, thousands of sit ups and millions of dollars of fake ass CGI.

Moral courage is the gritty, scary and mostly anonymous process of challenging friends, co-workers and family on issues like spanking, taxation, debt, circumcision and war.

Moral courage is standing up to bullies when the audience is not cheering, but jeering. It is helping broken people out of abusive relationships, and promoting the inner peace of self knowledge in a shallow and empty pseudo-culture.

Moral courage does not ask for - or receive - permission or the praise of the masses. If the masses praise you, it is because you are helping distract them from their own moral cowardice and conformity. Those who provoke discomfort create change - no one else.

So forget your politics and vampires and magic wands and photon torpedoes. Forget passively waiting for the world to provoke and corner you into being virtuous. It never will.

Stop watching fictional courage and go live some; it is harder and better than anything you will ever see on a screen.

Let's make the world change the classification of courage from 'fantasy' to 'documentary.'

You know there are people in your life who are doing wrong. Go talk to them, and encourage them to pursue philosophy, self-knowledge and virtue.

Be your own hero; you are the One that your world has been waiting for.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“The romantic seeks only to get his head into the heavens. The rationalist seeks to get the heavens into his head – and it is his head that splits.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change