 Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth. 
Aristotle
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Marianne Williamson
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" -find out how he feels about astrology
Robert A. Heinlein
Excerpt from the Notebooks of Lazurus Long
I have an accent when I speak. I do not have an accent, when I think.
Ricardo Valenzuela
speech given before the Eris Society, 2004
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of a conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Ayn Rand
Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
Henry David Thoreau
Walden (1854)
When the judgment’s weak, the prejudice is strong.
Kane O'Hara
Live for yourself or live for God. You can't have it both ways. It's one or the other!
Anonymous
Sign in front of a local "Church of Christ"
Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.
Anton Chekhov
People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Lesson? Boobs are worse than killing. Thanks Jesus. You prick. : P
Jeremy Johnson
the "Saving Private Ryan" thread
Kant . . . united typically within himself the best features of the Enlightenment
Wilhelm Windelband
A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, VOL. II, p. 532.
Lyrically it’s about thinking for yourself. As the title implies that doesn’t mean reject everything people tell you, but always question things so you can find your true path. Inspired partly by Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. A quote from that book, “Notice how they’ll accept anything except a man who stands alone.”
Nick Hexum
www.311.com - Talking about the band's song "Reconsider Everything" from their album "Evolver"
There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
" A warrior would rather be defeated and killed than to be forced to act against his nature."
Unknown Author
Taylor in POLTERGEIST 2
A woman narrows a man's heart. The marriage of a friend usually means the loss of a friend.
Kant
Remarks
"Never let your 'morals' prevent you from doing what is right."
Isaac Asimov
Salvor Hardin in FOUNDATION by Isaac Asimov
Well then, fuck off.
Lindsay Perigo
Lindsay Perigo
Samuel Bailey writes of Kant: 'No one, after reading the extracts, etc., can be surpised to hear of a declaration of men of eminent abilities, that, after years of study, they have not succeeded in gathering one clear idea from the speculations of Kant . I should have been almost surprised if they had. In or about 1818, Lord Grenville, observed to Professor Wilson, that, after five years' study of Kant's philosophy, he had not gathered form it one clear idea. Wilberforce made the same confession to another friend of my own. "I am endeavoring" exclaims Sir James Mackintosh, in the irritation of baffled efforts, "to understand this accursed german (sic) philosophy."'
William James
The Types of Philosophical Thinking
Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
H. L. Mencken
www.theagitator.com
Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' is six-hundred pages of technical, crow-blowing verbiage, that enshrines whim worship and wraps it in a cloak of reason.
Adam Mossoff
Immanuel Kant's Gimmick
Kant's system is the biggest and most intricate booby trap in the history of philosophy - but it's so full of holes that once you grasp its gimmick, you can defuse it without any trouble and walk forward over it in perfect safety. And once it is defused, the lesser Kantians ... will fall of their own weightlessness, by chain reaction.
Ayn Rand
'Philosophy: Who Needs It' (Address at West Point Military Academy, 1974)
"Attack someone's political opinions and risk being taken for a fool but assault someone's musical tastes and you may be taken as an enemy."
Robert Jourdain
MUSIC, THE BRAIN, AND ECSTASY, Robert Jourdain
"When I tell you what a thing causes or suffers, then do not ask the further question: 'What is the thing?' When I tell you what concept you must form of a thing, then the other question 'What is the thing in itself?' does not make any sense."
Moses Mendelssohn
Morning Hours
...human institutions...arise as they do in light of certain facts about the world and human beings and how these all interconnect. If we get it wrong about all this, we mess the society up royally...
Tibor R. Machan
“War itself, provided it is conducted with order and a sacred respect for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and gives nations that carry it on in such a manner a stamp of mind only the more sublime the more numerous the dangers to which they are exposed, and which they are able to meet with fortitude. On the other hand, a prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice, and effeminacy, and tends to degrade the character of the nation.”
Kant
In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude … Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second. Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true.
Bertrand Russell
A History of Western Philosophy
The products of a thought process (the content of thought) are not quite as crucial as the process itself (the mode of thought). In all unclear cases, the proper rule to follow is to allow mode to supercede content. If the mode of thought is correct, then the content of thought will be something which approaches the real (and context dictates the precision required to deal with reality productively). This is what is meant by the statement that: 'What you believe is not as important as how you believe.'
Edward D. Thompson
Ed Thompson
Is there a category for things that increase risk for a person but so fulfill them and bring them joy and make them feel alive, that it outweighs a statistical increase in risk? Sure. It's called "Things That Are Moral And Proper" But that is if, and only if, the individual himself makes that determination. That's because YOUR life is YOURS, and no one else's. That's also why you shouldn't give a shit about what other people think about who you fuck, or what you drink. The ultimate moral standard is man's life--not existence, but life and happiness.
Scott DeSalvo
SOLO
Indeed, not all attacks—especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin—are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.
Hans Selye
From Dream to Discovery: On Being a Scientist
It’s man’s nature to adapt the “standard” or the “regular”, the “natural” for his own gain and happiness. He can take the unexceptional or the average and enhance it to make his life better. Observe how animals mate. It’s functional and quite unexceptional. Observe how humans are capable of making love. It can be a complex, nuanced, conceptual, sublime experience, incorporating the sophisticated “ritual” of courting, romancing, flirting, ad then kissing, foreplay, etc. None of these were intended by nature, these are man’s creations, transforming a functional act of procreation into something much greater.
Glenn Lamont
The reason I choose this vineyard and this group of grape stompers is that we all understand that just as important as a great wine is a great party where you can savor it.
James Kilbourne
SOLOHQ
All passions, rationalized and controlled, become an art: gastronomy, more than any other passion, is sensitive to rationalism and direction.
Charles Pierre Monselet
Some time ago, a questionnaire on “Intellectual Immoralities” was circulated by a well-known institution. “Intellectual Immorality No. 4” read: “Generalizing beyond one’s data.” [Wilder Dwight] Bancroft asked whether it would not be more correct to word question No. 4 “Not generalizing beyond one’s data.”
Hans Selye
From Dream to Discovery: On Being a Scientist
Indeed, not all attacks—especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin—are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.
Hans Selye
From Dream to Discovery: On Being a Scientist
Trend is not destiny.
Rene Dubos
A God Within
Learn and live.
Edward D. Thompson
Subway Sandwich TV Commercial
The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
The Physiology of Taste, 1825
The rational argumentator will tolerate dissent and divergence from his position, though he will still seek to actively engage it; he will never ostracize another individual from his company for the mere fact of such dissent.
G. Stolyarov II
The Mark of the Fanatic http://www.geocities.com/rational_argumentator/fanatic.html
Conformity is deformity.
G. Stolyarov II
Where's the challenge in living life with a safety net?
Paul Hibbert
Excerpted from a dialogue with himself.
The most intractable problem for contemporary philosophers to overcome is to learn how and when to sacrifice precision for accuracy (when the goal is to think well, nothing is more vital than accuracy).
Edward D. Thompson
We are ahead of our time, and, hopefully, we have all our time ahead of us.
G. Stolyarov II
Remark to a Fellow Advocate of Immortality
If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.
Jacob Hornberger
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