 The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.
Stephen King
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley
Profit motive is proper motive.
Erica Schulz
Erica Schulz
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I saw a singer, based in New Orleans, say on the Food Network the other day something to the effect of how the incredible generosity of people around the country after Katrina "should be something we see all the time." To which I say...Nonsense! Katrina was an epic disaster. People were in trouble, not due to their own making, and of course many outside of New Orleans were able and willing to respond with generosity, if they could. But life is not one gigantic hurricane. Life is not a hospital room, or a disaster--at least not in a free and rational country, where prosperity comes to the surface and is the norm. Life is normally without hurricanes, and even most hurricanes are not as bad as Katrina. Disaster is not the normal, usual state of mankind, and, therefore, help and generosity are not man's most important virtues. Man's most important virtues are productivity, integrity, self-responsibility and, yes, the enjoyment and happiness that these virtues allow. (These virtues also make possible generosity, by the way.) I'm sick of people, especially celebrities and politicians, trying to induce unearned guilt.
Dr. Michael Hurd
http://www.drhurd.com/
There is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper himself - an object of reverence.
Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead
... certainly in the Bush era, the republican -- standard republican -- party is becoming less and less friendly to libertarian ideas. There is just practically nothing libertarian about George Bush, with the possible exception of tax cuts. But when tax cuts are not linked with spending cuts, which they've not been with Bush, it's not so much libertarian as, as fobbing off a responsibility on a later generation.
Brian Doherty
http://www.booktv.org/feature/index.asp?segID=7933&schedID=475
"With great power, comes great responsibility. With great responsibility, comes great honor. With great honor, comes great pride. With great pride, comes a great life."
Warren Chase Anspaugh
In the spiritual realm, the currency--which exists in limited quantity and must be teleologically measured in the pursuit of any value--is time, i.e., one's life. Since a value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep, and the amount of possible action is limited by the duration of one's lifespan, it is part of one's life that one invests in everything one values.
Ayn Rand
Rand, A. (1966, 1990). Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded second edition. New York: Meridian. p 34.
Man's consciousness is his least known and most abused vital organ. Most people believe that consciousness as such is some sort of indeterminate faculty which has no nature, no specific identity and therefore no requirements, no needs, no rules for being properly or improperly used.... Men abuse, subvert and starve their consciousness in a manner they would not dream of applying to their hair, toenails or stomachs. They know that these things have a specific identity and specific requirements, and, if one whishes to preserve them, one must comb one's hair, trim one's toenails and refrain from swallowing rat poison.
Ayn Rand
Our Cultural Value-Deprivation
Nobody can waste your time without your consent. If somebody wasted your time, then this is really another way of saying that you weren't focused enough, and assertive enough, to close (or limit) the conversation or interaction with the other person who allegedly 'wasted your time.' How you word things, including to yourself, can be very important. I suggest NOT saying to yourself, 'He wasted my time.' It's better to think of it as, 'I wasted my time with him.' This self-responsible wording will encourage correct thinking, i.e., thinking that assumes you have control over your life, your destiny ... and your time.
Dr. Michael Hurd
http://www.drhurd.com
All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Life is the ultimate value and is constituted of a passing series of moments. To waste time is to waste life and thus to commit slow suicide.
Luke Setzer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/1000.shtml#6
"Man's Search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning... Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!"
Victor Frankl
Ask not what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive... then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Howard Thurman
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Howard_Thurman
The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.
Erica Jong
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Erica_Jong
Security is mostly a superstition... Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
Helen Keller
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
Winston Churchill
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
Dalai Lama
Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.
Dale Carnegie
Besides, every means is a sub-end.
Ayn Rand
Mayhew, R. (Ed.). (1995). Ayn Rand's Marginalia. (p. 123) New Milford: Second Renaissance Books.
You are what you eat, drink, breathe, think, say and do
Patricia Bragg
Bragg Apple Cider Vinegar
Assume, man as man and his relationship to the world as a human one, and you can exchange love only for love, confidence for confidence, etc. If you wish to enjoy art, you must be an artistically trained person; if you wish to have influence on other people, you must be a person who has a really stimulating and furthering influence on other people. Every one of your relationships to man and to nature must be a definite expression of your REAL, INDIVIDUAL life corresponding to the object of your will. If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an EXPRESSION OF LIFE as a loving person you do not make of yourself a LOVED PERSON, then your love is impotent, a misfortune.
Erich Fromm
The Art of Loving
You're always with yourself, so you might as well enjoy the company.
Diane von Fürstenberg
Vogue
The more perfect a thing is, the more susceptible to good and bad treatment it is.
Dante Alighieri
http://www.worldofquotes.com/topic/perfection/index.html
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/antoine_de_saintexupery.html
Aim at perfection in everything, though in most things it is unattainable. However, they who aim at it, and persevere, will come much nearer to it than those whose laziness and despondency make them give it up as unattainable.
Lord Chesterfield
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/lord_chesterfield.html
The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.
Abul'-Ala' al-Ma'arri (973-1057) (Syrian poet)
Christian — One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.
H. L. Mencken
A Mencken Chrestomathy
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.
H. L. Mencken
Minority Report: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks
Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.
Avicenna
a friend on paltalk...
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
Henry Ford
As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naíve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.
Fyodor M. Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
There can be nothing more dreadful than that the actions of a man should be subject to the will of another.
Kant
In a time of universal deception, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Aristotle
Metaphysica
In America, religion is relatively nonmystical. Religious teachers here are predominantly good, healthy materialists. They follow common sense. They would not stand in our way. The majority of religious people in this country do not accept on faith the idea of jumping into a cannibal’s pot and giving away their last shirt to the backward people of the world. Many religious leaders preach this today, because of their own leftist politics; it’s not inherent in being religious. There are many historical and philosophical connections between altruism and religion, but the function of religion in this country is not altruism. You would not find too much opposition to Objectivism among religious Americans. There are rational religious people. In fact I was pleased and astonished to discover that some religious people support Objectivism. If you want to be a full Objectivist, you cannot reconcile that with religion; but that doesn’t mean religious people cannot be individualists and fight for freedom. They can, and this country is the best proof of it.
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A, edited by Robert Mayhew, 2005, p. 63. (Hat tip to Michael Kelly for this reference)
Just as the shepherd is superior in kind to his sheep, so, too, the shepherds of men, or, in other words, their rulers, are superior in kind to their peoples. This, according to Philo, was the argument advanced by Caligula, the Emperor, who drew from the analogy the perfectly true conclusion that either Kings are Gods or their subjects brute beasts. The reasoning of Caligula, of Hobbes, and of Grotius is fundamentally the same. Far earlier, Aristotle, too, had maintained that men are not by nature equal, but that some are born to be slaves, others to be masters. Aristotle was right: but he mistook the effect for the cause. Nothing is more certain than that a man born into a condition of slavery is a slave by nature. A slave in fetters loses everything -- even the desire to be freed from them. He grows to love his slavery, as the companions of Ulyesses grew to love their state of brutish transformation. If some men are by nature slaves, the reason is that they have been made slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves: cowardice has perpetuated the species.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
Calvin Coolidge
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Yes, there is a Santa Claus, someone who distributes unconditional joy, and every day is Christmas. And Santa Claus is you.
Ted Keer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/0741_2.shtml#50
If you're trying to convince us, then you need to demonstrate that you understand Objectivism before presuming to criticize it.
William Dwyer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Dissent/0107.shtml#14
Men will not be free until the last King is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Cynic: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
Ambrose Bierce
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
They understood that the cases were fabricated, yet they kept on working year after year. How could they? Either they forced themselves not to think (and this in itself means the ruin of a human being), and simply accepted that this was the way it had to be and that the person who gave them their orders was always right...
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live,
Ayn Rand
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde
Whether someone calls themselves an Objectivist is an interesting matter. I see it as offering acknowledgement to Rand's ideas and formulations. It isn't to declare allegiance to her every word, or to pretend to speak in her name. I find it interesting that those trying to maintain the purity of the philosophy end up making it incredibly difficult for people to simply acknowledge her ideas. It's like they don't want anyone to believe any part of it, or to credit any of the ideas, unless they accept it all without criticism.
Joseph Rowlands
Every prescription is a description, since all statements about reality, including normative or ethical statements, are simply statements of fact - statements about what exists.
William Dwyer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/ObjectivismQ&A/0187_2.shtml#52
"Leadership is not magnetic personality—that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not "making friends and influencing people"—that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations."
Peter F. Drucker
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