 Politeness is one of those advantages which we never estimate rightly but by the inconvenience of its loss.
Samuel Johnson
Johnson: Rambler #98 (February 23, 1751)
Before you have an argument with your boss, take a good look at both sides -- his side and the outside.
Charles Givens
SuperSelf
People don't care what you know until they know that you care.
Zig Ziglar
Ziglar on Selling
Fundamentalist Christianity - fascinating. These people actually believe that the world is 12 thousand years old. Swear to God. What the..? Based on what? I asked them. "Well we looked at all the people in the Bible and we added 'em up all the way back to Adam and Eve, their ages - 12 thousand years." Well how fucking scientific, okay. I didn't know that you'd gone to so much trouble. That's good. You believe the world's 12 thousand years old? "That's right." Okay I got a one word question, ready? "uh huh." Dinosaurs.
Bill Hicks
Philosophy
The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything. . . . That's the whole point about good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about.
Noam Chomsky
Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.
Anonymous
Native American Proverb
I told you where your course would take you. It has. ... I'm not going to help you pretend -- by arguing with you -- that the reality you're talking about is not what it is, that there's still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn't. ... I didn't come here to argue.
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
I deal with the life-givers, not with the cannibals.
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
Everything has a price; there are no free rides. The price you pay for participating in a larger society of intelligent and passionate people is the intensity and passion of their flaws.
George Cordero
from Solo article, "A Letter to Cassandra," November 7, 2004
It's not who I am underneath, but what I do, that defines me.
Batman
Batman Begins
There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
Erich Fromm
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.
Unknown Author
Unknown
Therefore a wise prince ought to adopt such a course that his citizens will always in every sort and kind of circumstance have need of the state and of him, and then he will always find them faithful.
Nicolo Machiavelli
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext98/tprnc11.txt
[On what he called 'The Slacker State'] I don't want to have my money scalped off me to maintain other people's children. I don't like other people; I particularly don't like their children; I deeply disapprove of their proliferation making the globe uninhabitable. The fucking idiots - I don't want to pay for their fucking.
A.L. Rowse
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,6121,935394,00.html
Religion has been the driving force behind the anti-choice laws, the opposition to stem-cell research, the opposition to gay rights and state-church separation. ... Some people call Atheism a 'radical' idea and it is. Radical means 'root' and Atheism addresses the root cause of the issues we struggle.
Ellen Johnson
Public Statement from American Atheists
Never underestimate the wrath of a patient man.
Anonymous
Every place outside of the USA is an absolute hellhole. As much as we can complain about the US's lack of freedom, I just can't stand when they force women to dress like BATMAN, when they leave little girls out to die. I mean, at least we address the issues of equality and freedom, which are not even addressed in a place like Egypt or China or India.Other countries are pieces of s**t, so they have a holier-than-thou attitude. I think the most insulting thing you can say about anybody is that they're more popular in another country.
Penn Jillette
Contact Music.com
I think they would have particularly liked rap music. It has the sort of effect Neanderthals would have enjoyed.
Steven Mithen
The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language and the Mind.
Liberty is the breath of life to nations.
George Bernard Shaw
Government by Bullies [A chapter from "A Treatise on Parents and Children"]
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangel, Leonard da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
Harry Lime
Spoken by Orson Welles "The Third Man"
All the doctors who warned me not to smoke or drink died long ago.
Jean Sibelius
Famous Finnish composer who lived to the age of 91.
"A product can be banned because legislatures don't like it, or because you get a majority vote," said Eugene Volokh, law professor at UCLA. "In some states, they ban the sale of horse meat, not because horses have a right to life, but just because the government thinks it's icky. There is no constitutional right to eat what you like or sell what you want to sell."
Eugene Volokh
Court TV; http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=99&e=2&u=/ct/20050708/cr_ct/potflavoredpopsahitwithcandyloversbutnotlawmakers
A superstitious man suspects everything that is pleasant. It seems inbred in his nature, and in the nature of most people. You let such a man pull up a little weed and taste it, and if it is sweet and good, he says, "I'll bet it is poison." But if it tastes awful, so that his face becomes a mask of disgust, he says, "I'll bet you that it is good medicine."
Robert Ingersoll
There have always been people without judgment but this is the first era in which being non-judgmental is considered good -- though how anything can be considered good if you are non-judgmental is another puzzle.
Thomas Sowell
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20050714.shtml
Industry need not wish.
Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac, 1739
After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.
William S. Burroughs
Bush said he has considered candidates from all walks of life for the Supreme Court but refused to tip his hand on whom he will name, when he will do it or whether he wants to replace retiring O'Connor.
President George W. Bush
Yahoo
A can't change the laws of physics.
James Doohan as Scotty
Star Trek, "The Naked Time," 1966
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
Andre Maurois
Andre Maurois, French writer
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C.S. Lewis
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
Ayn Rand
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplacable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
Ayn Rand
There are no niggers; there are only black-skinned people whom some white-skinned people don't like and call "niggers." There are no Christ-killers; there are only Jews whom some Christians don't like and call "Christ-killers." Similarly, there are no addicts; there are only people who take some drugs which some other people think they should not take and who therefore call them "addicts."
Thomas S. Szasz
"Don't throw away wisdom because it is found in the company of folly; but do not say that folly is wisdom because it is found in its company."
Robert Ingersoll
You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed - that has nothing to do with the business of the State.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah
Founder of Pakistan in 1947.
Did you know that you need a vocabulary at least 10 times larger for thinking than you do for talking?
Anonymous
http://www.thelatinroad.com/
"The meek shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us will travel to the stars."
Michael Marotta
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN BILLION Discussion
Some claim that majoritarianism, despite its faults, is an alternative preferable to physical conflict. They're wrong: majoritarianism is physical conflict. Elections are a process of counting fists, rather than noses, and saying, 'We outnumber — we could beat you up and kill you — you might as well give in and save everyone a lot of trouble.' Majoritarianism, to put it straightforwardly, possesses the full measure of nobility manifested by any other form of extortion.
L. Neil Smith
"PIZZACRACY: Majoritarianism Versus Unanimous Consent""
Jody, you asked James: "Then what exactly is your quarrel James?" Here is the response he attempted to post, but his posts are not being accepted (nor are mine):
Barbara Branden
private email
In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
Mortimer J. Adler
The sophistry of passion outweighs all that reason can urge.
Robert Ingersoll
Man rises above the perceptual level by integrating his percepts into concepts, his concepts into principles, his principles into sciences, and all of his sciences into a philosophy.
Ayn Rand
(The Art of Non-Fiction, p.27)
"As long as you assume that you are making the weather, what can you do? You will try in vain to make good weather and you will never succeed, and because you are all the time angry at yourself for making rain, you will never invent an umbrella."
Carl Jung
Jung's Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathrustra
Alone, adj. In bad company.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary
When you have robbed a man of everything, he is no longer in your power. He is free again.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Today, at the news conference announcing his new position as head coach of the National Hockey League's Phoenix Coyotes, the best player to play the game and part owner of the franchise, Wayne Gretzky made two statements replete with pride in both his abilities and property, as well as integrity in his actions:
1. "I wasn't naturally gifted with size or speed. Everything I did in hockey, I worked for. And that's the way I'll be as a coach."
2. "I have an investment in the team, an ownership stake in this team and I felt like I was the best person to coach this team."
Wayne Gretzky
http://tsn.ca/nhl/news_story.asp?id=132749
Hey, fellas: there's something out there that electrocutes people on beaches, collapses buildings like cardboard, and drowns ships and villages. It's called nature. The next time the western horizon flames with crimson, remember that this is what Foucault never saw. Foucault was struck down by the elemental force he repressed and edited out of his system. Science, disdained by Foucaldians, is our only hope for controlling the retrovirus and marauding infections of AIDS. Science and society are our frail barriers against the turbulence of cruel, indifferent nature.
Camille Paglia
from the essay "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders," in her book Sex, Art, and American Culture.
"I think a single man can accomplish in a day what a committee could accomplish in a month."
Bill Lear [Lear Aircraft]
The uniform, constant and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived, is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration. Like the unknown principle of animal life, it frequently restores health and vigour to the constitution, in spite, not only of the disease, but of the absurd prescriptions of the doctor.
Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations, Book II Chapter III
'When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.'
Albert Einstein
http://www.physlink.com/
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