 It's not who I am underneath, but what I do, that defines me.
Batman
Batman Begins
Everything has a price; there are no free rides. The price you pay for participating in a larger society of intelligent and passionate people is the intensity and passion of their flaws.
George Cordero
from Solo article, "A Letter to Cassandra," November 7, 2004
I deal with the life-givers, not with the cannibals.
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
I told you where your course would take you. It has. ... I'm not going to help you pretend -- by arguing with you -- that the reality you're talking about is not what it is, that there's still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn't. ... I didn't come here to argue.
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.
Anonymous
Native American Proverb
The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything. . . . That's the whole point about good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about.
Noam Chomsky
Fundamentalist Christianity - fascinating. These people actually believe that the world is 12 thousand years old. Swear to God. What the..? Based on what? I asked them. "Well we looked at all the people in the Bible and we added 'em up all the way back to Adam and Eve, their ages - 12 thousand years." Well how fucking scientific, okay. I didn't know that you'd gone to so much trouble. That's good. You believe the world's 12 thousand years old? "That's right." Okay I got a one word question, ready? "uh huh." Dinosaurs.
Bill Hicks
Philosophy
People don't care what you know until they know that you care.
Zig Ziglar
Ziglar on Selling
Before you have an argument with your boss, take a good look at both sides -- his side and the outside.
Charles Givens
SuperSelf
Politeness is one of those advantages which we never estimate rightly but by the inconvenience of its loss.
Samuel Johnson
Johnson: Rambler #98 (February 23, 1751)
We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge. The very name given to the highest institutions of learning reminds us, that from antiquity and throughout many centuries the universal aspect has been the only one to be given full credit. But the spread in both depth and width, of the multifarious branches of knowledge in the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We clearly feel that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum-total of all that is known into a whole; but on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it.
Erwin Schrodinger
What is Life?
“Man's proper stature is not one of mediocrity, failure, frustration, or defeat, but one of achievement, strength, and nobility. In short, man can and ought to be a hero.”
Mike Mentzer
“Man's proper stature is not one of mediocrity, failure, frustration, or defeat, but one of achievement, strength, and nobility. In short, man can and ought to be a hero.”
Mike Mentzer
At best, one can say that humans TEND to be this or that. And that is hardly a fitting basis for constructing a universal human morality.
Nathan Hawking
SoloHQ
There is no ultimate standard for what is legal. "Legal" is whatever we choose to make legal.
Nathan Hawking
SoloHq
For when men... have once surrendered their minds and have given their allegiance to the opinion of some man, they bring no enlargement to the sciences themselves, but merely act as servile functionaries and attendants to glorify certain authors...
Francis Bacon
The Great Instauration, Preface
If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.
Edward Hopper
The Patriot Act simplifiedOnce a Man said to a Horse "If I put this saddle on you, together we can hunt and kill the Wolf, our mutual enemy." The horse agreed and was saddled. After the Wolf was slain, the Horse turned to the Man and said, "Now please take the saddle off." The Man laughed, and said "No."
Unknown
Ethics is not a mystic fantasy — nor a social convention — nor a dispensable, subjective luxury.... Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival — not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.
Ayn Rand
'The Objectivist Ethics': The Virtue of Selfishness
If there is no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters -- then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do, now, today.
Angel
"Angel" (Epiphany)
Abstainer, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary
A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.
Johan Huizinga
The Waning of the Middle Ages
Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything--and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.
Clarence Thomas
http://wid.ap.org/scotus/pdf/03-1454P.ZD1.pdf
Imagine a world ...in which the principle of private ownership of the means of production is fully realized, in which there are no institutions hindering the mobility of capital, labor, and commodities, in which the laws, the courts, and the administrative officers do not discriminate against any individual or groups of individuals whether native or alien. Imagine a state of affairs in which governments are devoted exclusively to the task of protecting the individual's life, health, and property against violent aggression. In such a world the frontiers are drawn on the maps, but they do not hinder anybody from the pursuit of what he thinks will make him more prosperous. No individual is interested in the expansion of the size of his nation's territory, as he cannot derive any gain from such an aggrandizement. Conquest does not pay and war becomes obsolete.
Ludwig von Mises
Scattered showers, my ass!
Noah, upon being handed the long-range weather forecast
Ancient, Apocryphal & Salacious (my accountants)
...libertarians only get their way when the semi-paralysis of divided government occurs. Once one party dominates, government and spending grow like a cheese souffle.
Paul Chadwick
Concrete: the Human Dilemma #6, May, 2005
I am so fortunate to have found, on Solo and elsewhere, people who are self-aware, women who have earned the right to be treated as equals, individuals who recognize and appreciate my value. These are the people who have everything to do with me; they enrich my life and I rejoice in their existence.
Barbara Branden
Jennifer Iannolo's New Mantra
When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.
Clifton Fadiman
"Very few art works are called Spit on Shit. It's about being alive in the western world," George says. "What else?"
Gilbert and George
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1497071,00.html
In fact, instead of saying that man is the only political animal, what I perhaps should say even more sharply here is that man is the only constitutional animal.
Mortimer J. Adler
Adler M.J. The Great Ideas. Peru, Illinois: Open Court, 2000.
"Fear is the mindkiller."
Frank Herbert
"Paul Atreides" -DUNE
Religion and war. Like mixing nitro and glycerin.
Pat Gorman
MAY 2005 Resource Consultants newsletter
"A man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry."
Bible
Ecclesiastes 8:15
This was a subtle but complete misunderstanding of Simonyi’s intention and practice, and it just goes to show you that if you write convoluted, dense academic prose nobody will understand it and your ideas will be misinterpreted and then the misinterpreted ideas will be ridiculed even when they weren’t your ideas.
Joel Spolsky
http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html
Respected Objectivists, I warn you, due to my admiration for your integrity and moral standards, not to fall into the intellectual trap that is SoloHQ, populated not by Objectivists but by post-modern nihilists/hedonists in Objectivist guise.
G. Stolyarov II
Email to Chicago Objectivist Group 05/30/05
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi
http://www.loveisearned.com/html/quotations.htm
I quit when the court of appeals reversed my ruling. The purpose for which I had chosen my work, was my resolve to be a guardian of justice. But the laws they asked me to enforce made me the executor of the vilest injustice conceivable. I was asked to use force to violate the rights of disarmed men, who came before me to seek my protection for their rights. Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct, which they both accept. Now I saw that one man was bound by it, but the other was not, one was to obey a rule, the other was to assert an arbitrary wish - his need - and the law was to stand on the side of the wish. Justice was to consist of upholding the unjustifiable. I quit - because I could not have borne to hear the words 'Your Honor' address to me by an honest man.
Judge Narragansett, Atlas Shrugged
http://www.loveisearned.com/html/quotations.htm
"Greatnessis a transitory experience...It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him."
Frank Herbert
"Collected Sayings of the Muad' Dib" -DUNE
"Hitler's holocaust 6 million, Stalin's famine and terror 8 million, and Mao's famine 30 million. But the greens have topped them all. In a single crime they have killed about 50 million people. In purely numerical terms, it was the worst crime of the 20th century. It took place in the USA in 1972. It was the banning of DDT.
Andrew Kenny
The Spectator
Never argue with an idiot. They bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.
Unknown Author
I'm not a slut; I'm just sexually generous.
Jason Dixon
I use my tongue as a guide.
Jennifer Iannolo
Man moves from knowledge to more advanced knowledge, automatizing his identifications and discoveries as he proceeds--turning his brain into an ever more efficacious instrument, if and to the extent that he continues the growth process.
Nathaniel Branden
The Psychology of Self-Esteem
Morality gains all of its ground out of the actualization of individual life. Only by reference to this individual actualization can moral judgment gain prescriptive ground.
Edward D. Thompson
http://solohq.com/Forum/NewsDiscussions/0712.shtml#5
Yep, that system of socialism and touchy-feely public education really seems to be working out. Just like Darwin said it would.
Mr. Lion
"And the Darwin Award goes to..." (post from Capitalist Lion)
I am in favor of federally funded stem-cell research for the same reason that I
am in favor of teaching evolution in public schools. Ideally, the US government
would fund neither medical research nor education--but given that it does so,
its actions must be ruled by reason, not by an effort to promote or enforce the
superstitious restrictions of any particular strain of religious mysticism.... As a symbolic issue, to spend billions on medical research while
exempting this one area sends the same message the president will send if he
uses his first and only veto to block this bill: that enforcing religious
restrictions is the government's highest priority.
Robert Tracinski
TIADaily
If passion drives, let reason hold the reins.
Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac, 1749
Only the Sith deal in absolutes
Obi Wan Kenobi to Darth Vader
Star Wars III - Revenge of the Sith
The trick is to listen to your 'inner grandmother.' She's got a little more wisdom than your inner child.
Loretta LaRoche
Life Is Not a Stress Rehearsal
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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