 Rand is not going to save you from your insecurities. If you don't move beyond her into creation in the real world you won't go anywhere. You can talk about the "story," but what is the solution? Rappers are better than Objectivists. They are the real capitalists. They don't talk about it. They live it.
Anonymous
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.
C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.
Ayn Rand
Facebook | Ayn Rand
A terrible thing happened to America on Sunday, March 21, 2010. The country took its biggest step ever down a road diametrically opposed to its original intent of keeping the state small so that the individual can be free and great.
Dennis Prager
It's a Civil War: What We Do Now
Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world.
Thomas Sowell
Race and Politics: Part I
"Minarchists such as [Tibor Machan] are libertarians with regard to all goods and services except those they arbitrarily label as “governmental.” Regarding those, they are socialists pure and simple, conceptually indistinguishable from their fellow socialists, in this one arena."
Walter Block
Anarchism and Minarchism; No Rapprochement Possible: Reply to Tibor Machan
"I've long had a theory that most people don't find libertarianism so much as it happens to them. They find themselves on the receiving end of some sort of government incompetence or abuse, or they know someone who is, and it starts them on the road to a generally more skeptical view of state power."
Radley Balko
Reason.com "I used to be somebody that trusted the government. Now I really don’t trust anything."
Government exists to secure our rights, not to make us morally good, whether as this is understood by modern liberals or by modern conservatives.
Tibor R. Machan
Anti-Libertarian Point Refuted
"Every invasion of individual rights happens with the eager support of people acting in the sincere and thoroughly mistaken confidence that what they permit the state to do to others will never be done to them."
William Norman Grigg
author of the blog Pro Libertate
"The seminal error is to insist on exceptions to the principle that government – assuming, of course, that one should be permitted to exist – must be strictly limited to protecting the life, liberty, and property of every individual."
William Norman Grigg
the blog Pro Libertate
"[Slavery consists of being] "subject to the incessant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man. "
John Locke
Second Treatise of Civil Government
I do think, at a certain point you've made enough money
Barack Hussein Obama
"I maintain, however, that the effectiveness of government versus that of private arrangements to produce goods and services is irrelevant to the issue of the desirability of government in a libertarian society. Governments are not created to produce goods and services for citizens. Rather, they are created and imposed on people by force, most often for the purpose of transferring resources from the control of those outside government to the control of those within it. Without government—or even with a weak government—predatory groups will impose themselves on people by force and create a government to extract income and wealth from these subjects."
Randall G. Holcombe
Government: Unnecessary but Inevitable
"While Friedman’s theoretical work is universally admired by professional economists, there’s much more ambivalence about his policy pronouncements and especially his popularizing. And it must be said that there were some serious questions about his intellectual honesty when he was speaking to the mass public."
Paul Krugman
Reason.com, article about Krugman, threaded comments starting at 11:51pm on 5.7.10
"Also invariably critics on the left accuse libertarians of being "selfish" and "greedy" and being for rich people and against ordinary people. This charge is so far off the mark and beside the point it is almost impossible to respond to. It’s like accusing a computer of being short. It has nothing to do with what a computer is."
Doug Carkuff
"Neither Left Nor Right" at LewRockwell.com
....today there is little economic freedom in America. And almost from our first day as a Nation, there was little monetary freedom; now, there is none.
Henry Mark Holzer
Gold and Monetary Reform
'Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!' cries she with silent lips. 'Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!'
Emma Lazarus
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/ArticleDiscussions/2217_2.shtml#55
Rather than fight the same tired battles that have dominated Washington for decades, it’s time to try something new. Let’s invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt. Let’s meet our responsibility to the citizens who sent us here. Let’s try common sense.
President Barack Obama
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/
A gaffe in Washington is when someone inadvertently blurts out the truth.
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Washington Times
One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.
Ayn Rand
Voice of Reason
"Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth. "
Aristotle
You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealth out of prosperity.
anonymous
(email from a friend)
"I would not wish death upon Paul Krugman or Nancy Pelosi. However, if I outlive either of them and one day read their obituary, that particular day will almost certainly be a bit happier and more enjoyable than it otherwise would be. If that makes me a bad human being, so be it."
Jim Henshaw
Reason.com , "David Weigel Resigns From the Washington Post", 6.26.10 @ 9:29PM
"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
LewRockwell.com
"To say 'I love you' one must first be able to say the 'I.' "
Ayn Rand
jittery.com
"No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent."
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln, October 16, 1854, title page of Book IV of Nancy Kress's "Beggars in Spain"
Economic debate is simply a projection of political debate; it is not scientific debate. It is political debate between two irreconcilable points of view. That isn't demonstrable science, it is simply wrestling.
Fred Bartlett
The Third Depression thread
... the long-running debate between big government and small government misses the point; it isn’t relevant to today’s challenges.
President Barack Obama
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/07/13/president-obama-announces-a-new-omb-director-jacob-lew
“What saved the economy and the New Deal [during the Great Depression] was the enormous public-works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.”
Paul Krugman
"Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, 'Thank God, I'm still alive.' But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again."
Barbara Boxer
Brainyquote.com
[Ayn Rand] made a, I believe, an unneccessary polarity between selfishness -- or self-interest -- and altruism. She saw those as opposites. She saw that, or believed, altruism was fundamentally evil. ... I always felt like that was just inaccurate to human nature: That fundamentally human beings are both self-interested and capable of love, and that you can't understand human beings unless you see that we are both of them -- and so I reject the polarity.
John Mackey
http://www.booktv.org/search.aspx?For=freedomfest
"We are sort of a mongrel people ... I mean we're all kinds of mixed up. That's actually true of white people as well, but we just know more about it."
Barack H. Obama
The Hill.com
"permission [to build a mosque near Ground Zero] should be refused, and if they go ahead and build it, the government should bomb it out of existence, evacuating it first, with no compensation to any of the property owners involved in this monstrosity."
Leonard Peikoff
"Forced to be Free", Reason.com, via link at Peikoff.com
Elites may have more brilliance, but those who make decisions for society as a whole cannot possibly have as much experience as the millions of people whose decisions they pre-empt.
Thomas Sowell
http://www.theatlasphere.com/columns/100729-sowell-smart-sacrifice.php
"We don't need to make a movie out of [Atlas Shrugged] ... We are living it right now."
David Kelley
"Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 years"
Nancy Pelosi keeps talking about how she was going to "drain the swamp." This is unfair to swamps.
Daniel Henninger
WSJ, 5 August: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703545604575407632023079038.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
"This means that the government may not refuse a zoning permit to a group because it’s Muslim, or Tea Party, or Socialist, or anti-gay-rights. It may not try to use landmarking law to bar the group from reconstructing a building, if the law is being used because of the group’s message.... These are basic principles of American free speech law, and of American religious freedom law. They help protect all of us, liberal or conservative, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or atheist."
Eugene Volokh
Volokh.com via Reason.com re: Ground Zero mosque
"The [Republican] party's Senate candidate in Nevada wants to privatize Medicare and Social Security ... I could go on, but you get the point. Democrats may be facing a tough fight this fall, but Republicans are giving them plenty of material to work with. The big political story of the year may turn out to be the consequences of the GOP's foray into extremism and wackiness."
Eugene Robinson
"With Friends Like These", RealClearPolitics.com
"Newcomen drove 12,238 miles across 30 U.S. states to pen a message using GPS tracking that can only be read using Google Earth. The message? 'Read Ayn Rand.'"
Peter Suderman
Gizmodo.com via Reason.com, "This Country Has Ayn Rand Written All Over It"
"... there’s also a streak in Ayn Rand that is very right-wing and explains in part why, despite her atheism and despite the obviously anti-conservative elements of her thought, nonetheless there are deeper elements that are very appealing to the conservative mind. Those are, firstly, her absolutism and secondly, her attempt to ground the case for liberty in nature."
Brink Lindsey
Reason.com, "Brink Lindsey on the Classics of Conservatism--Traditional and Liberal Varieties"
Her [Ayn Rand's] absolutism is a reasoned position that contrasts with altruistic or low self-esteem positions that value or use large doses of uncertainty or humility.
Steve Wolfer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Quotes/1708.shtml#3
What I worry about would be that you essentially have two chambers, the House and the Senate, but you have simply, majoritarian, absolute power on either side. And that's just not what the founders intended.
President Barack Obama
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/barack_obama_4.html
Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation - not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago.
President Barack Obama
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/barack_obama_3.html
“I have been led to the conclusion that as long as a philosopher does not carry out his analysis of measurable objects to the point where the mathematician can find unities, measures, and dimensions he must surely still be hanging on to some confusion, or at least the predicates of his propositions do not apply uniformly to the subjects.” —J.H. Lambert to Kant (Feb. 3, 1766)
Lambert
"It is a feeling to be hunted. They come in uniforms . . . "
Marta Jaworski
reason.com, "Sorry, But Our Zoning Regulations Forbid You From Celebrating Your Freedom"
"North Korean doctors are expected to serve the people selflessly. Because of a shortage of X-ray machines, they often must use crude fluoroscopy machines that expose them to high levels of radiation; many older North Korean doctors now suffer from cataracts as a result. They not only donate their own blood, but also small bits of skin to provide grafts for burn victims ... with anesthesia in short supply, acupuncture would be used for simpler surgeries ... patients would be strapped to the operating table to prevent them from flailing about ... the right to 'universal free medical service ... to improve working people's health' was in fact written into the North Korean constitution."
Barbara Demick
"Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea", pages 106-107
Any exercise carried on beyond the least amount required to stimulate an optimal increase is not merely a waste of effort, it is actually highly counterproductive.
Mike Mentzer
High-Intensity Training the Mike Mentzer Way by John Little
" ‘From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged,” Whittaker Chambers wrote here 53 years ago, “a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’” What he did not write is that Ayn Rand throws in a gas chamber. It’s about two-thirds through, in a chapter called “The Moratorium on Brains,” than which I reread no farther. (Our president seems to have inspired — which is not quite the word — half the country to read Miss Rand, and I wanted to remind myself what she was teaching them.)"
Jason L. Steorts
National Review Online, "The Great Ghastly Rand"
Charitably speaking, this means leading by persuasion and example, always going the last mile for peace, giving others (or, "the other") the benefit of the doubt and so on. The real-world benefits are supposed to flow naturally from there, but if they don't, so what? Doing right is its own reward. [break] Uncharitably speaking, this is what might be called the Paula Abdul theory of foreign policy, after the famously forgiving former judge on American Idol. Never mind that you can't sing, or that you're letting yourself be played for a sucker: What counts is that you feel good about yourself, presumably because you're doing something good. Another name for this kind of thinking is moral narcissism.
Bret Stephens
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703369704575461283206035848.html
“There are times where you can afford to redecorate your house, and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding the foundation.”
President Barack Obama
Barack Obama, February 2009
|
