 Effectively packaged, nearly any idea, no matter how vile, can attract the loyalty of some.
Tibor R. Machan
Life & Property
Education is too important to be left to government. The freer parents and entrepreneurs are, the more innovative American schooling will be — and the more children will learn.
John Stossel
When you try to explain the inexplicable, then you are about to forgive the unforgivable.
Nicolas Sarkozy
The New York Sun
Reality does not require believing - it demands knowledge, which comes from your reasoning faculty [which is why you have it, and what it is for].... only the non-real demands believing..
Unknown Author
Human life is not equivalent to 'death prevention'
Edward D. Thompson
A Question Regarding the Objectivist Ethics
"... principles shouldn't fly out the window when on the battlefield. Moreover, that might be where we need them most, where our actions will bring severe consequences one way or other. "
RoR Member 216 Jordan
"What is an Objective Justice System?" RoR Law
Christ appears and splits the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. And then, over a thousand years of the millennium, that the world is reigned in two places, Jerusalem and Missouri. The law will come from Missouri, and the other will be from Jerusalem...
Mitt Romney
Hitchens in Slate
The only leverage a philosopher has is the principle of noncontradiction.
Keith Burgess-Jackson
"The Logic of Torture" -- TCS Daily -- http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=112707C
Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you'll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. We should have learned that lesson on Sept. 11, 2001, when big government flopped big-time and the only good news of the day came from the ad hoc citizen militia of Flight 93.
Mark Steyn
"The Future Belongs to Islam," MacCleans, Oct. 20, 2006
"Public relations was invented in the United States, yet we are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals,"
Robert Gates (US Sec'y Def)
CNN: "... enemies 'eating our lunch' online"
The world exists for us human beings. It is not we who exist for the world, as the enemies of mankind would have it, for a world without humans lacks every sense of existence.
Manfred F. Schieder (1937 - )
From Manfred's own mind, a product and non-dualistic part of matter
We are all entitled to our own opinions. None of us are entitled to our own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Sen. Daniel Moynihan
I aim for the stars, but sometimes I hit London and Antwerp
Werner von Braun
Werner v. Braun
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow
If, on your journey, you should encounter God, God will be cut.
Quentin Tarantino
Kill Bill: Volume 1
Trust that still, small voice that says, "This might work and I'll try it."
Diane Mariechild
http://www.cybernation.com/quotationcenter/quoteshow.php?type=author&id=5741
That fact of the matter is I am smarter than most O'ists. That is what makes me human.
Robert J. Kolker
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Dissent/0166_1.shtml#29
"Philosophy saves us one mind at a time/Or not at all, and only by our choice."
Walter Donway
"Ayn Rand: A Centennial"
If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.
H.P. Lovecraft
The idea of God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology. A personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever. God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind.
Sigmund Freud
I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
Jack London
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist knows it
J. Robert Oppenheimer
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever."
Thomas Jefferson
Never let man imagine that he can pursue a good end by evil means, without sinning against his own soul! Any other issue is doubtful; the evil effect on himself is certain.
Robert Southey (1774-1843)
http://www.giga-usa.com/quotes/topics/evil_t007.htm
But we are social persons, not social animals. Hence we cannot be satisfied, as the gregarious animals are, simply by herding together, simply by being useful to another, or simply by the pleasures of bodily contact. We want to share one another's lives. How can this be done? Only by conversation -- which is indispensable to love. Love without conversation is impossible. Conversation without love is quite possible, but then it is only abstract discussion, not the heart-to-heart talk which is the conversation of lovers. Unless we love and are loved, each of us is alone, each of us is deeply lonely. Unless we enjoy the community of love -- the communication or conversation of love, we cannot get out of ourselves, and we are shut out from all others, as animals are, even when they herd closely together.
Mortimer J. Adler
http://radicalacademy.com/adleronloveintv2.htm
Those who trust in themselves and in their own merits are, as it were, blinded by their own ‘I’ and their hearts harden in sin. On the other hand, those who recognize themselves as weak and sinful entrust themselves to God and from him obtain grace and forgiveness.
Pope Benedict XVI
(Address to participants in a course organized by the Apostolic Penitentiary, Friday, Mar 7)
In the case of murder, the death penalty - issued by way of putting the culprit to sleep to then apply the lethal injection - is the time delayed procedure of self-defense as carried out by the representatives of the victim(s) who, at the time of the incident and due to the then existing circumstance, was/were unable to defend itself/themselves from the wilful murderous attack.
Manfred F. Schieder (1937 - )
From Chapter 6 of "Ayn Rand, I and the Universe" (http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Schieder/The_Logically_Resulting_Type_of_Society.shtml)
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
William (Bill) H. Gates
For optimal well-being, folks need to be made to feel uncoerced, capable, and somehow connected to others.
Edward D. Thompson
[my summary of “self-determination theory”]
Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois is the current beneficiary of a tsunami of drool.
Christopher Hitchens
http://www.slate.com/id/2181460/
Republicans who vote for tax increases are rat's heads in coke bottles.
Grover Norquist
Leave Us Alone
Here at home, our State Department is advising its officials to avoid perfectly descriptive terms for our enemies like "jihadist" and "Islamo-fascist" in favor of vague terms like "violent extremist" or "terrorist" -- as if we could just as easily be fighting Basque separatists.
Victor Davis Hanson
The Half-Won, Half-Lost War
I want them to feel that they are somebody and their congressman is somebody. And when they say, 'This is nice,' it feels good.
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY)
US News & World Report (http://www.usnews.com/blogs/washington-whispers/2008/05/02/out-loud-may-2-2008.html)
The Bible and Morality: The Bible lacks any guidance of morals. On purpose, whoever wrote the Genesis presented the fantasy figure called "God" as not being in the least interested in people to behave morally but only to obey, like ignorants, his commands, however criminal and immoral they were (the Bible presenting ample proofs of this). To attain this end, the Genesis had to stigmatize "opening the eyes" or "gaining knowledge" as a sin. Reason was forbidden. Were the Bible to be taken as a teaching of morals, as it purports, "Adam and Eve" would had never been forbidden to taste the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for precisely discerning between good and evil is the very fundament of morality.
Manfred F. Schieder (1937 - )
Manfred F. Schieder's own mind.
Reality-Based Reality Is Best
http://www.freemarksteyn.com/
The problem with elections is that anybody who wants an office badly enough to run for it probably shouldn't have it. And anybody who does not want an office badly enought to run for it probably shouldn't have it, either. Government office should be received like a child's Christmas present, with surprise and delight. Instead it is usually received like a diploma, an anticlimax that never seems worth the struggle to earn it.
Orson Scott Card
Empire
Some of us worry about an insurgent Islam and its attendant complications for a decayed Western civilization; some of us worry about global warming. In twenty years' time, one of us we be proved right and the other will look like an idiot.
Dennis Prager
Mark Steyn's America Alone
And guess what this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be all about socializing . . . uh, uh . . . will be about basically taking over, and the government running all of your companies.
Maxine Waters (D-CA)
May 22, 2008, during the House hearing on oil prices. Video link
You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.
General Sir Charles Napier
Quoted in America Alone, Mark Steyn
That church teaches us that we can make God happy by being miserable ourselves; that a nun is holier in the sight of God than a loving mother with her child in her thrilled and thrilling arms; that a priest is better than a father; that celibacy is better than that passion of love that has made everything of beauty in this world. That church tells the girl of sixteen or eighteen years of age, with eyes like dew and light; that girl with the red of health in the white of her beautiful cheeks - tells that girl, 'Put on the veil, woven of death and night, kneel upon stones, and you will please God.' I tell you that, by law, no girl should be allowed to take the veil and renounce the joys and beauties of this life.
Robert Ingersoll
Atheism alone is a rotting corpse. I substitute art and nature for God -- the grandeur of man and the vast mystery of the universe.
Camille Paglia
Salon.com
We will never be safe in this country if we continue to kill three thousand babies a day. We can never expect God's protection.
Gregg Jackson
Book TV Interview
Benjamin Hayden said: "Fortunately for serious minds, a bias recognized is a bias sterilized." Voltaire said: "The perfect is the enemy of the good." Integrating them both leaves ‘perfectionism’ – something really good for mankind – morally unscathed, as the more perfect perfectionists will have a more perfect perspective regarding the inherent pitfalls of perfectionism, per se.
Edward D. Thompson
Personal Thoughts
The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.
Ayn Rand
"The Only Path to Tomorrow" Readers Digest, Jan 1944
Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value.
Dean Steacy, Canadian Human Rights Commission, on Mark Steyn's Show Trial
RealClearPolitics
In the Bullshit Department, a businessman can't hold a candle to a clergyman. 'Cause I gotta tell you the truth, folks. When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money!
George Carlin
I wasn't born in America - but I got here as fast as I could.
Elon Musk
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=061808B
We fight for the trust and for the tryst; for fixed memories and the possible meeting of men; for all that makes life anything but an uncontrollable nightmare. We fight for the long arm of honour and remembrance; for all that can lift a man above the quicksands of his moods, and give him the mastery of time.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The Appetite of Tyranny
Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.
Marilyn Monroe
wikipedia
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
wikipedia
|
