 "Don't you see, Lonestar? Evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
Mel Brooks
Spaceballs
Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake...drama is life with the dull bits left out."
Alfred Hitchcock
They understood that the cases were fabricated, yet they kept on working year after year. How could they? Either they forced themselves not to think (and this in itself means the ruin of a human being), and simply accepted that this was the way it had to be and that the person who gave them their orders was always right...
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago
I observed on one of the drums belonging to the marines being raised that there was painted a rattlesnake with this modest motto under it "don’t tread on me". It occurred to me that the rattlesnake, being found in no other quarter of the world besides America, might therefore be chosen to represent her. Having frequently seen the rattlesnake I ran over in my mind every property by which she was distinguished. I recollect that her eye excelled in brightness that of any other animal, and that she has no eye lids, she may therefore be esteemed an emblem of vigilance. She never begins an attack, nor when once engaged never surrenders, she is therefore en emblem of magnanimity and true courage. As if anxious to prevent all pretentions of quarreling with her the weapons with which nature has furnished her she conceals in the roof of her mouth, so that to those unacquainted with her she appears to be a most defenseless animal and even when they are shown and extended for her defense they appear weak and contemptible, but their wounds however small are decisive and fatal. Conscious of this she never wounds until she has generously given notice even to her enemy and cautioned him against the danger of treading on her. I counted the rattles ... and found them just 13, exact the number of colonies united in America, and I recollected too, that this was the only part of the snake that increases in numbers. ... Tis curious and amazing to observe how distinct and independent of each other the rattles of this animal are and yet how firmly they are united together so as to never be separated but by breaking them to pieces. One of those rattles singly is incapable of producing sound, but the ringing of thirteen together is sufficient to alarm the boldest man living. The rattlesnake is solitary and associates with her kind only when it is necessary for their preservation. In winter the warmth of a number together will preserve their lives, while singly they would probably perish. The power of fascination attributed to her by her a generous construction may be understood to mean that those who consider the liberty and blessing which America affords and once come over to her never afterwards leave her, but spend their lives with her. She strongly resembles America in this, that she is beautiful in youth and her beauty increaseth with her age, her tongue is blue and forked as the lightning, and her abode is among impenetrable rocks.
Benjamin Franklin
The Completed Autobiography
...freedom isn't a commodity to compromise.
Captain America
Brian Michael Bendis, The New Avengers #21, August, 2006
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live,
Ayn Rand
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde
Whether someone calls themselves an Objectivist is an interesting matter. I see it as offering acknowledgement to Rand's ideas and formulations. It isn't to declare allegiance to her every word, or to pretend to speak in her name. I find it interesting that those trying to maintain the purity of the philosophy end up making it incredibly difficult for people to simply acknowledge her ideas. It's like they don't want anyone to believe any part of it, or to credit any of the ideas, unless they accept it all without criticism.
Joseph Rowlands
Every prescription is a description, since all statements about reality, including normative or ethical statements, are simply statements of fact - statements about what exists.
William Dwyer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/ObjectivismQ&A/0187_2.shtml#52
"Leadership is not magnetic personality—that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not "making friends and influencing people"—that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations."
Peter F. Drucker
The only wealth is life.
Henry David Thoreau
Investor Words Quote of the Day -- http://www.investorwords.com
I will not abandon a previous approach whose logic I understand, even though it may mean forgoing large, and apparently easy, profits to embrace an approach which I don't fully understand, and have not practiced successfully.
Warren Buffett
Investor Words Quote of the Day -- http://www.investorwords.com
Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked.
Jane Austen
Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.
Paul Gauguin
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. You are the guy who'll decide where to go.
Theodor Seuss Geisel
"For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer."
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Never give a sword to a man who can't dance.
Confucius
So here's what I don't understand: if profit is supreme, why doesn't a company like General Motors sell crack? Crack is a very profitable commodity. For every pound of cocaine that is transformed into crack, a dealer stands to make a profit of $45,000. The dealer profit on a two-thousand-pound car is less than $2,000. Crack is also safer to use than automobiles. Each year, 40,000 people die in car accidents. Crack, on the other hand, according to the government's own statistics, kills only a few hundred people a year. And it doesn't pollute.
Michael Moore
http://www.michaelmoore.com/dogeatdogfilms/whydoes.html
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World peace, the final stage of the Holy Call [to convert to Islam], is reached only with the conversion or submission of all mankind to Islam…Muslims believe that expansion through war is not aggression but a fulfillment of the Koranic command to spread Islam as a way to peace. The resort to force to disseminate Islam is not "war," a word that is used only to describe the use of force by non-Muslims. Islamic wars are not "wars" but rather acts of "opening" the world to Islam and expressing Islamic jihad. Relations between Dar al-Islam, the home of peace, and Dar al-Harb, the world of unbelievers, nevertheless take place in a state of war, according to the Koran and to the authoritative commentaries of Islamic jurists. Unbelievers who stand in the way, creating obstacles for the Holy Call, are blamed for this state of war, for the Holy Call can be pursued peacefully if others submit to it. In other words, those who resist Islam cause wars and are responsible for them.
Bassam Tibi
Prominent Muslim scholar, author of nine books, currently a professor at Cornell University, 1996
"I don't need to be lectured by you. You are no more a protector of the Constitution than am I."
Arlen Specter
shouted after Sen. Russ Feingold declared his opposition to the amendment, his affinity for the Constitution and his intention to leave the meeting.
Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. We increasingly see that people around the world are flocking towards a main focal point – that is the Almighty God. Undoubtedly through faith in God and the teachings of the prophets, the people will conquer their problems. My question for you is : Do you not want to join them? Mr President, Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things.
Iranian dictator Mahmood Ahmadi-Najad
Ending of letter from "President" Mahmood Ahmadi-Najad to President George Bush
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
John Wooden
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
John Wooden
I have heard Republicans who have read the Book of Mormon express astonishment that any rational person could believe that.
Robert Novak
"Religion may hinder Romney in '08", Chicago Sun-Times
"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling... In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat."
Eric Hoffer
The True Believer, Section 10
"Life is too short to be little."
Benjamin Disraeli
No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that is in the right and keeps on a-comin'.
Captain Bill McDonald, Texas Ranger
http://andrewbernstein.net/heroes/41_cowboy.htm
Children are educated by what the grown-up is, and not by his talk.
Carl Gustav Jung
If you agree with some tenets of Objectivism, but disagree with others, do not call yourself an Objectivist; give proper authorship credit for the parts you agree with—and then indulge in any flights of fancy you wish, on your own.
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand, "To the Readers of The Objectivist Forum,” The Objectivist Forum, Vol. 1, No. 1, ARI FAQ
This is the end of Western civilization.
Lewis Douglas (US Budget Director)
Steel, Ronald (1980). Walter Lippmann and the American century, Little, Brown and Company.
It is the men who will be content with nothing but the best whom we have to thank for every serious advance which man and society have actually made towards even a moderately "better". If the merely "relatively better" were enough to content us, it would not be apparent why we should take even the first steps.
A.E. Taylor
The Faith of a Moralist, Vol I., p. 139
I don't think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good.
Oprah Winfrey
Doug Fabian's Making Money Alert for March 22, 2006
Life... is strength. That is not to be contested; it seems logical enough. You live; you affect your world.
Jon Irenicus
Baldurs Gate 2
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
The cost of a network increases in proportion to the number of nodes, but the value of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of nodes.
Metcalfe's Law
Investor Words Quote of the Day -- http://www.InvestorWords.com
He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.
Ayn Rand
"To honor all men is to honor none."
Moliere
The Misanthrope
If you take a man as he is, you make him worse. If you take a man as he can be, you make him better.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Maybe Jesus was right when he said that the meek shall inherit the earth--but they inherit very small plots, about six feet by three.
Robert A. Heinlein
Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love
People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people.
V
V for Vendetta
What can "explain one of the most distressing features of the neo-Kantians: the fierceness and bitterness of their polemics, the nastiness of their ad hominem arguments, which destroyed personal friendships and decent collegial relations? Heinrich Rickert (Heidelberg) wrote to Paul Natorp (Marburg): 'Just because we critical idealists agree on fundamentals, we have to take the knives to each other."
Klaus Kohnke
From Klaus Christian Köhnke's _The Rise of Neo-Kantianism_ (Cambridge University Press 1991), p. x:
The people who sow that fear want something from you, and it usually is not in your best interest to heed them.
Kurt Eichert
You’ve got one life and today’s context...every f**k up is sending you that much further away from realizing your potential–that is called a sacrifice.
Michael Newberry
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
Rabbi Hillel
Ancient Hebrew adage
By its nature, evasion is a form of nonintegration. It is the most lethal form: the willful disintegration of mental contents. A man in this condition no longer has the means to determine consistency or contradiction, truth or falsehood. In his conciousness, all conceptual content is reduced to the capricious, the baseless, the arbitrary; no conclusion qualifies as knowledge in a mind that rejects the requirements of cognition. Thus the real evader, like the hypothetical one I mentioned first, reaches only one end and one kind of "safety": all-encompassing blindness.
Leonard Peikoff
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Picasso
I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
James Madison
The Free Dictionary - Quotation of the Day
When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission.
Flemming Rose
Why I Published Those Cartoons
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence—it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master.
George Washington
http://www.objectivistcenter.org/cth--810-Example_Our_First_President.aspx
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
Thomas Paine
http://www.objectivistcenter.org/cth--810-Example_Our_First_President.aspx
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