 No people in history have ever survived who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies. 
Dean Acheson
What is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?
Rowan Atkinson
Rowan Atkinson, speaking to the House of Lords last month in opposition to the Blair government's Racial and Religious Hatred Bill.
Anarchism is the most irrational, anti-intellectual notion ever spun by the concrete-bound, context-dropping, whim-worshiping fringe of the collectivist movement.
Ayn Rand
The Objectivist: September 1971
The morality of sacrifice lives on borrowed time.
Andrew Bernstein
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4433
Don, get a clue. Rand chose the dollar sign as her personal symbol. It's Objectivism's cross, its crescent, its star of David. If the dollar sign doesn't represent materialism, nothing does.
Dan Flynn
Flynnfiles.com
Don't pass judgement (about private conduct) unless you know something is improper, and so don't wish to deal with the person. If you are not personally involved, don't pass judgement.
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Answers, p. 138.
Some hear with their ears, some with their stomachs, some with their pockets, and some hear not at all.
Kahlil Gibran
Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran
My proof convinces the ignorant, and the wise man's proof convinces me. But he whose reasoning falls between wisdom and ignorance, I neither can convince him, nor can he convince me.
Kahlil Gibran
Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran
He brings disaster upon his nation who never sows a seed, or lays a brick, or weaves a garment, but makes politics his occupation.
Kahlil Gibran
Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran
Seven times have I despised my soul: The first time when I saw her being meek that she might attain height. The second time when I saw her limping before the crippled. The third time when she was given to choose between the hard and the easy, and she chose the easy. The fourth time when she committed a wrong, and comforted herself that others also commit wrong. The fifth time when she forbore for weakness, and attributed her patience to strength. The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face, and knew not that it was one of her own masks. And the seventh time when she sang a song of praise, and deemed it a virtue.
Kahlil Gibran
Sand and Foam
Behold here is a paradox: the deep and the high are nearer to one another than the mid-level to either.
Kahlil Gibran
Sand and Foam
A pearl is a temple built by pain around a grain of sand. What longing built our bodies and around what grains?
Kahlil Gibran
Sand and Foam
A religion is sometime a source of happiness, and I WOULD NOT DEPRIVE ANYONE OF HAPPINESS. But it is a comfort appropriate FOR THE WEAK, not for the strong. The great trouble with religion — any religion — is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak certainty of reason - BUT ONE CANNOT HAVE BOTH.
Robert Anson Heinlein
Friday
A proof of courage ? To step into someone else’s shoes!
Ciro D'Agostino
What is it that you're objecting to?
Mum
Mrs Monica Elliot
I do not believe that men are afraid of dying, they are afraid of being cowards.
Ciro D'Agostino
Passion with out technique is furor!
Ciro D'Agostino
“If I ask people whether they believe in life, they never understand what I mean. It's a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do, then I know they don't believe in life. Why? God — whatever anyone chooses to call God — is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own.”
Ayn Rand
We the Living
Well, I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.
Crash Davis
Bull Durham
What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I'm semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing...he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance...Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen… and he'll get all the great women.
James L Brooks (screenwriter)
Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks) to Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) in Broadcast News (1987)
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mahatma Gandhi
Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others.
Ayn Rand
GS, FNI, 200 – ARL p 158
Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
Robert Anson Heinlein
More from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long / Time Enough for Love
Faith and force . . . are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.
Ayn Rand
“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 80 – ARL p 158
Luxury is the roadmaker of progress.
Ludwig von Mises
Socialism
That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you. The important thing about you is what you choose to make happen - your values and choices. That which happened by accident - what family you were born into, in what country, and where you went to school - is totally unimportant.
Ayn Rand
"Over and over the jihadist enemy tells us why he wants to kill us, and over and over we dismiss his words or reduce them to our own categories. Paralyzed by our fear of being “insensitive” to cultural differences, and deluded by our materialist preconceptions that reduce religion to an expression of some more “real” cause, we refuse to name clearly the enemy: an Islamic faith that for centuries has killed, enslaved, plundered, ravaged, and conquered in the service of its arrogant assurance of its spiritual superiority."
Bruce Thornton
http://victorhanson.com/articles/thornton101305.html
Playboy: Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life? Rand: Qua religion, no — in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusion of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and code of moral values, were made by religion, before man graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very—how shall I say it?—dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.
Ayn Rand
“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” – ARL p 411
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
Robert A. Heinlein
Excerpts from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long/Time Enough for Love
"You seem to imply that when another bookstore closes, it is our obligation to offer what they had on their shelves. How does one go about copying another person's vision?"
Steve Riggio
Barnes and Noble Booksellers, in response to "Letter from a Concerned Customer"
If you don't know what your goals are, don't be surprised when you don't attain them
Nathaniel Branden
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent--it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.
Robert Anson Heinlein
Excerpts from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long/Time Enough for Love
The federal man gets to tell you what your labours are worth, and he pays you in company scrip, promissory IOUs, except you, not he, is the lender; he is the market’s only buyer and the market’s only seller. You plays and you pays and you pays, from the sweat of your brow and the pain of your bones until the organs finally give out. So don’t go whining to me about $3 gas.It’s the $20 an hour that I am giving up to Greenspan that pisses me off – especially when Alan and his greenie whore at the network use it to mess with ... discounted working stiffs like me.
David Bond
http://www.silverminers.com/Editorials.aspx?id=1
I must say I am impressed with the SOLOists who have shown up here. Both in terms of intellectual seriousness and basic civility, you folks are a BIG step up from the ARI people I have encountered!
Michael Prescott
From the blog of a best-selling suspense author and one who has rejected Objectivism - http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2005/05/it_just_gets_wo.html
People change their own minds, or their minds don't really change.
Kevin Haggerty
When A takes money from B to give to C, and A is a legislator, the process is called taxation. But when A is an officer or director of a corporation, it is called philanthropy.
Warren Buffett
Investor Words Quote of the Day http://www.investorwords.com
Once again Paul Krugman has failed to win the Nobel Prize in economics. This year's winners are Robert J. Aumann and Thomas C. Schelling, "for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis." Why them, and not Krugman? One clue is Aumann's academic affiliation. He is with the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Krugman isn't at the center of anything. And he has nothing to do with rationality.
Don Luskin
Don Luskin's Blog: The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid
I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government other than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.
Samuel Johnson
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/s/samueljohn135383.html
"My personal life," says Ayn Rand, "is a postscript to my novels: it consists of the sentence, 'And I mean it.' I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books--and it works for me, as it works for my characters. The concretes differ, the abstractions are the same." ... "I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I wrote about don't exist. That this book has been written--and published--is proof that they do."
Ayn Rand
"About the Author," at the end of Atlas Shrugged
I think a lot of people are afraid of freedom. They want their lives to be controlled, to be put into a box... Why should someone put a limit on how much fun I can have, how much I can accomplish?
Drew Carey
www.reason.com
The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybartic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons.
Salman Rushdie
Step Across This Line
"A dogma is a set of beliefs accepted on faith; that is, without rational justification or against rational evidence. A dogma is a matter of blind faith."
Ayn Rand
Well, the world needs ditch-diggers, too.
Judge Elihu Smails
What do firefighters fight? Fire. what do crimefighters fight? Crime. What do freedom fighters fight?
George Carlin
The Ninth Amendment amounts to the phrase: "insert political philosophy here." In referring to other rights not enumerated in the Constitution, it invites judges to refer to basic principles of political philosophy to define what those rights might be. And I don't think the Founders ever imagined the controversy that would follow from this, since they all accepted the natural rights philosophy of Locke as proven and universal.
Robert Tracinski
The Intellectual Activist Daily
I don't build in order to have [profits]. I have [profits] in order to build.
Ayn Rand
A bastardization of a favourite Roark quote used to settle the question of whether profits are an end in themselves. They are not.
You ever notice how we're a big country with a diverse population, but the only two people we can get to run for office are two people you wouldn't even trust to take your laundry to the laundromat. "Hey George can you,... nevermind I'll take them myself" "But I can..." ""No just sit here. Don't touch anything! Don't do anything! Don't mess anything up! And PLEASE don't talk!"
Henry Rollins
Talk is Cheap
"[Regard] language as a tool of honor, always to be used as if one were under oath--an oath of allegiance to reality."
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
Jodie Foster, on career and motherhood: ``I hear my mother's voice -- `Should you have walked away from that? Will you be able to take care of yourself and your kids? You're getting old, it won't last. ...' But the choices are easily made. I'm not going to miss that Thanksgiving breakfast. I'm not going to let someone else pick out their shoes.''
Jodie Foster
The Los Angeles Times
There are no holidays in the fight against evil.
Don Adams as Maxwell Smart
Get Smart
|
