 When you deny your individuality, when you give it away for acceptance into a subgroup of people, you are harming the country.
Rush Limbaugh
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/today.guest.html
As I see it, the debate turns, ultimately, on whether you hold man's survival, or man's survival qua man as your touchstone. My argument, essentially, is that it is only the latter that Objectivism contemplates.
Mindy Newton
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/ObjectivismQ&A/0331_3.shtml#74
Retroactive (or ex post facto) law- i.e., a law that punishes a man for an action which was not legally defined as a crime at the time he committed it- is rejected by and contrary to the entire tradition of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. It is a form of persecution practiced only in dictatorships and forbidden by every civilized code of law. It is specifically forbidden by the United States Constitution. It is not supposed to exist in the United States and it is not applied to anyone- except to businessmen.
Ayn Rand
America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business
Suddenly the focus of the morality has shifted from simply helping other people to sacrificing in order to do it. You're judged as virtuous if you sacrifice a lot for the cause. In fact, how moral the act is gets measured by how much you benefit or sacrifice for it. If you benefit, it lowers how moral it was. If you sacrifice for it, it increases the virtue of the act by showing how dedicated you are to helping other people.
Joseph Rowlands
http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Rowlands/Is_Altruism_Really_About_Self-Sacrifice.shtml
"If it's really a charitable contribution, I'm assuming [the tax savings] shouldn't be the determining factor of whether you're giving to the homeless shelter down the street." The change in the deduction rate, he added, "is not going to cripple" wealthy taxpayers.
Barack H. Obama
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/03/24/live_blogging_obamas_press_con.html
...prosperity foregone is invisible. In other words, we can never tell how much richer we would have been without today's level of congressional interference in our lives...
Walter E. Williams
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/03/18/prosperity_lost
Floor, or table? I don't care!
Dialog from Battlestar Galactica
Helen to Saul Tighe "Deadlock"
Will capitalism be any different?
Charlie Rose
Charlie Rose interview of Timothy Geithner
The process by which these changes have been forced upon this body is so deeply offensive to me, and so deeply undemocratic, that it puts the omnibus appropriations package in jeopardy ...
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29609567
The highest moral act anyone can do is productive work.
Jason Lewis (Radio Host)
http://www.jasonlewisshow.com/main.html
...with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy.
Charles Krauthammer
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/03/a_dishonest_gimmicky_budget.html
The idea that capitalism -- in the 'unknown ideal' sense of which Rand spoke -- lends itself to pull-peddling and corporate welfare, is pure, and total, nostrum. This myth needs to be exploded, if ever folks are to gain a correct and productive idea of the inherent benevolence of capitalism. The conflation of centralized initiation of force ("subsidies," "regulations," and bailouts for bad investments) with capitalism is the pivotal issue at hand. This wrong-headed view must be countered by correct epistemology and ethics. It must not continue to infect the minds of the masses.
Edward D. Thompson
http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Thompson/What_Were_Up_Against_Critique_of_a_Contemporary_College_Text.shtml
But the triumph of ideas was completed by the Treatise of Human Nature [by David Hume], which discards spirits also, and leaves ideas and impressions as the sole existences in the universe. ... It seemed very natural to think, that the Treatise of Human Nature required an author, and a very ingenious one too; but now we learn, that it is only a set of ideas which came together, and arranged themselves by certain associations and attractions.
Thomas Reid
An Inquiry Into the Human Mind
If schools had pre-empted the right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this literacy.
John Taylor Gatto
http://oneducation.wordpress.com/
[paraphrase] "President Obama will talk about his early success. In just one month, he has already expanded government by 15%. That's a success."
political commentator [to be announced]
Live (streaming) audio at http://minnesota.publicradio.org/ (Obama's address to Congress)
One of the wonders of our times is how much more attention is paid to the living conditions of a bunch of cut-throats locked up in Guantanamo than to the leading international sponsor of terrorism getting nuclear weapons.
Thomas Sowell
http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/02/11/random_thoughts?page=2
What's a demonstration? It's when students show how much they don't know by repeating it loudly.
Leslie Nielson
An American Carol
If I hired musicians to sing at my bar, your damn right I can require them to sing on my command!
John Armaos
Are all rights Inalienable?
One of the most important skills for political success is the ability to make confident assertions of absurdities or lies.
Thomas Sowell
Random Thoughts
In securing victory, no strategem is more profitable than claiming already to have achieved it.
Wikipedia (Anonymous Editor)
Imagine you see a person at work taking buckets of water from the deep end of a swimming pool and dumping them into the shallow end in an attempt to make it deeper....That scenario is equivalent to what Congress and the new president proposes for the economy.
Walter E. Williams
The Spendulus
I think it is a great shame, that many people never develop a conscious enough sense of the pleasures of beauty, or self-actualization, or the admirable qualities of character in another person, or a host of other aspects of life. And failing to do so, they are ill-equipped to find the proper balance in their life.
C. Jeffery Small
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/ObjectivismQ&A/0321_1.shtml#39
Its one thing to be so deluded that you think everyone should pay for your pet programs. Its quite another to think everyone but you should pay for them.
Ryan Keith Roper
Daschle Bows Out
One skin, one driver.
Fred Bartlett
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/1363_4.shtml#98
"After Obama's election, I felt as close to hopelessness about this country's future as I've ever felt. But now I see a possible ray of hope. It may be that Republicans -- since at this point they have nothing to lose, and in the face of the disaster to which Obama is leading us -- will finally return to to the principles that once animated their party, and particularly to the defense of capitalism. And it might even happen that the controls Obama will establish, with their concomitant impoverishment of the country, will awaken the American voter to the fact that freedom is to his best interest, not entitlements and Big Brother. If both those things were to happen, then the long agony that faces us will have been worthwhile."
Barbara Branden
Using long, drawn-out processes to put money into circulation to meet an emergency is like mailing a letter to the fire department to tell them that your house is on fire.
Thomas Sowell
http://www.theatlasphere.com/columns/090130-sowell-government-spending.php
Our financial markets are only as strong as those who regulate them.
Chris Dodd, Sen (D)
Jan 27 Senate speech by Chris Dodd, 188 Days after he promised to release the terms of his sweetheart Countrywide home mortgages
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
Margaret Thatcher
I don't expect 100 per cent agreement from my Republican colleagues, but I do hope that we can all put politics aside and do the American people's business right now. ... The American people expect action.
Barack H. Obama
http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2009/01/28/obama-economy.html
"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation."
Dr. Adrian Rogers
I'd go so far as to say that recognition of the invalidity of the stolen concept is Objectivism in its essence. Rand's ethics depends upon it - her identification of the concept of value depending upon the concept of life is an example. Attempts to deny her axiomatic concepts based upon more derivative ideas such as doubt are another example of the fallacy. Almost every denial of one of Rand's formulations is based upon the stolen concept.
Ted Keer
What is original to Objectivism
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Unfortunately, what happens in Hollywood does not stay in Hollywood.
Andrew Breitbart
I Pledge...what?
The Federal Register, which lists new regulations, annually averaged 72,844 pages between 1977 and 1980. During the Reagan years, the average fell to 54,335. During the Bush I years, they rose to 59,527, to 71,590 during the Clinton years and rose to a record of 75,526 during the Bush II years. Employees in government regulatory agencies grew from 146,139 in 1980 to 238,351 in 2007, a 63 percent increase. In the banking and finance industries, regulatory spending between 1980 and 2007 almost tripled, rising from $725 million to $2.07 billion. So here's my question: What are we to make of congressmen, talking heads and news media people who tell us the financial meltdown is a result of deregulation and free markets? Are they ignorant, stupid or venal?
Walter Williams
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/01/14/congress_financial_mess
We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work ... After eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to boot!
Henry Morgenthau
Treasury Secretary under FDR, after 2 terms of FDR's "New Deal". Quote originally posted on DrHurd.com.
What's required is a new declaration of independence. Not just in our nation but in our own lives. Independence from ideology and small thinking. Independence from prejudice and bigotry. Independence from selfishness. An appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.
Barack H. Obama
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99529782
Nothing teaches objectivity like doing a basic physics experiment and proving to yourself first hand that the laws of physics aren't some made up thing like the tooth fairy or santa claus.
Mike Erickson
Knowledge about Knowledge
George Walsh was asked whether he thought Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony sounded malevolent. He said: "Of course. Can't you just hear the sheep gnashing their teeth?"
George Walsh
Ayn Rand on Beethoven
[T]he only acceptable outcome of this war, both for Israel and for the civilized world, is ... the disintegration of Hamas rule. It is already under way. This is not about killing every last Hamas gunman. Not possible, not necessary. Regimes rule not by physically overpowering every person in their domain, but by getting the majority to accept their authority. That is what sustains Hamas, and that is what is now under massive assault.
Charles Krauthammer
Two Endgames for Israel
Whoever called politics "the art of the possible" must have had a strange idea of what is possible or a strange idea of politics, where the impossible is one of the biggest vote-getters. People can get the possible on their own. Politicians have to be able to offer the voters something that they cannot get on their own. The impossible fills that bill perfectly.
Thomas Sowell
The Art of the Impossible
Objectivism is not a way of putting your life on autopilot. In the face of such matters as taste, temperament, talent, and level of intelligence a formula for an inflexible, infallable morality is impossible. One can only be as moral as ability allows, and should be judged on those isssues that matter most. [Moral p]erfection is an impossible goal.
Robert Davison
An Answer to Robert Bidinotto on Moral Perfection
Not even Gandhi was against the concept of Superior Violence.
Fred Bartlett
Violence is the Last Resort of the Incompetent
If you're not the lead dog, the view never changes.
Wikipedia (Anonymous Editor)
My father, George Kanaan (submitted by Traci Kanaan)
There once was a local standup routine in a West Coast pub (of all places) and in attendance was this small group of German tourists. After the show the comedian came down to the bar and the Germans wanted to buy him a drink. One of the visitors asks him, "You really have a great routine going, how come we don't have anyone as funny as you back home?". The Coaster set down his beer and says, "Because you killed them all."
Rick Giles
Where is Sarah House
Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating. ...For Hamas the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians.
Charles Krauthammer
A Real Cease-Fire Needed in Gaza
Drivers with road rage are like monkeys in cages that go berserk when the lab technician walks by their cage with a piece of food.
Edward D. Thompson
Pet Peeves
Hamas had to rub salt in the wounds by staging a grotesque victory parade worthy of a barbarian emperor, in which they publicly taunted Israel and the parents of Gilad Shalit. It was the sort of show that is outlawed by international law, that hasn't been practiced since the Middle Ages, but it attracted hardly a murmur of international condemnation. The Palestinians had their gladiator show. The admission price was yet to be paid.
Ami Isseroff
Thanks to Teresa
I think there are two kinds of incompetent people. Those that treat violence as a first resort, and those that treat it as a last resort. The former are thugs. The latter are cowards.
Joseph Rowlands
Gulching and Shrugging
Today, large parts of the modern world have abandoned reason as well as religion. If you were to look among academics for an intellectual defense of reason, you wouldn’t find many players on the field. I’m aware of a handful of philosophers who work in the Objectivist and Aristotelian tradition of Ayn Rand. There are Catholic philosophers. That’s it. The rest of academia is either actively hostile to the idea of reason itself, or has retreated to the safety of narrow, technical knowledge.
Jennifer Roback Morse
Jennifer Roback Morse in NRO on reason and Benedict XVI
All the campaign talk of the Great Depression, a Vietnam-like war, and our shredded Constitution will now thankfully subside as the Obama administration assumes office and solves problems with conciliation, dialogue, and multilateral wisdom, rather than shrillness, unilateralism, preemption, and my-way-or-the-highway dogmatism. We will hear that, by historical levels, unemployment is still not that bad, that GDP growth is not historically all that low, and that deficits, inflation, interest rates, and housing starts are all within manageable parameters. "Depression" will transmogrify into "recession" which in turn by July will be a "downturn" and by year next an "upswing" on its way to boom times.
Victor Davis Hanson
Life at New Animal Farm Won't Be All That Bad
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