 Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.
Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac, 1738
Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Thomas Edison
The simple fact is, there are people out there who are nothing more than a bipedal cheeseburger. They're a self propelled snack pack looking for someone to eat them. There is no helping the truly consumable among us.
Ken Cook
http://www.selfdefenseforums.com/forums/member.php?find=lastposter&t=8723
“I know nothing that is greater than the Appassionata. I'd like to listen to it every day. It is marvelous superhuman music. I always think with pride – perhaps it is naive of me – what marvelous things human beings can do! But I can't listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you must not stroke anyone's head: you might get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them on the head, without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use force against anyone. Hm, hm, our duty is infernally hard.”
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
quoted by Maxim Gorky (about Beethoven)
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
Robert Silensky
When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.
Joseph Stalin
When we estimate magnitudes through numbers, that is, conceptually, the imagination selects a unit, which it can then repeat indefinitely. But there is a second kind of estimation, which Kant calls "aesthetic estimation," in which the imagination tries to comprehend or encompass the whole representation in one single intuition. There is an upper bound to its capacity. An object whose apparent or conceived size strains this capacity to the limit - threatens to exceed the imagination's power to take it all in at once - has, subjectively speaking, an absolute magnitude: it reaches the felt limit, and appears as if infinite.[...] imagination reaches its maximum capacity, shows its failure and inadequacy when compared to the demands of Reason, and makes us aware, by contrast, of the maginificence of Reason iteslf. The resulting feeling is the feeling of the sublime.
Monroe C. Beardsley
Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present
It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds...
Samuel Adams
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of all who threaten it.
US Navy Billboard
"Problems loom large, when men don't." (Quoted in Reader's Digest)
Robert James Bidinotto
Robert James Bidinotto
God Bless America. Although I am an atheist, I just keep thinking that these days. Thank you, thank you, thank you that you exist, as an idea and a reality, an example and a promise. Thank you to the framers of the constitution, the wisdom of liberty that has still survived in the hearts of so many American people, and especially, thank you for this latest generation of men and women that are fighting for my values in the Middle East as their mainly Anglo-Saxon forefathers did for us in Europe. [SOLOHQ, Cowardly Europe thread, March 8]
David Bertelsen
SOLO has given me something I badly needed. And that is contact with Objectivists and/or Objectivist fellow travelers who have none of the intellectual rigidity and emotional repression, none of the spiritual straitjacket of duty, that are so prevalent elsewhere. So many of you appear to have taken the best of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, and left the rest. It is a great joy to me to see it. [SOLOHQ, Going Home thread, March 7]
Barbara Branden
If you don't like the pictures in our store, please just stay home. It's as simple as that.
Paul Marciano
Chairman of Guess clothes company responding to American Family Association complaints about Paris Hilton photos in Guess' stores. Quoted on SuperBeauty.org
Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground.
Anonymous
It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.
Winston Churchill
http://www.investorwords.com
To go straight to the deepest depth, I went for Hegel; what unclear thoughtless flow of words I was to find there! My unlucky star led me from Hegel to Schopenhauer . . . Even in Kant there were many things that I could grasp so little that given his general acuity of mind I almost suspected that he was pulling the reader's leg or was even an imposter.
Ludwig Boltzmann
Quoted in D Flamm. Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 14 (1983) 257.
Kant originated the technique to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age who have formally rejected mysticism without grasping the rudiments of rationality. The technique is as follows: if you want to propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusions must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader’s critical faculty – a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo sciences, to the never to be sciences, to the untraceable and the unprovable – all of it resting on a zero: the absence of definitions.
Ayn Rand
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle
It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.
Walid Jumblatt
Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try.
Peggy Noonan
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/34491.html
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
Ayn Rand
The Islamists have been clear all along about their plans to form an Islamic caliphate and inhabit the entire world with burqas, stonings, amputations, honor killings and a lack of religious and political freedom. Whether or not to oppose such a movement should have been a no-brainer, especially for self-proclaimed "progressives." Instead, they have extended their misguided sympathies to tyrants and terrorists.
Cinnamon Stillwell
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2005/02/24/cstillwell.DTL
America's high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don't just mean that they're broken, flawed or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools even when they're working as designed cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.
William (Bill) H. Gates
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/050227/ap/d88gh7do0.html
Toothbrush in the jaw toothbrush brush brush tooth jaw foam dome in the foam Roman dome come home home in the jaw Rome dome tooth toothbrush toothpick pickpocket socket rocket
Lois Cook
The Fountainhead
Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.
Fletcher Knebel
"Everybody thinks that I stand by the scientific character of my work and that my principal scope lies in curing mental maladies. This is a terrible error...I am a scientist by neccesity, and not by vocation. I am really an artist by nature."
Sigmund Freud
A disagreement that does not challenge fundamentals serves only to reinforce them.
Ayn Rand
"The Establishing of an Establishment", Philosophy: Who Needs It
Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
Albert Einstein
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
John Lennon
Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
Ayn Rand
It is only the shallow who do not judge by appearances.
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A man's character is his fate.
Heraclitus
If you wou'd not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.
Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac, 1738
Salem purified itself nearly to death but in the end some good may have come of it. I am not historian enough to assert this as fact, but I have often wondered if the witchhunt may have helped to spawn, 100 years later, the Bill of Rights, particularly the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits forcing a person to testify against himself — something that would have stopped the witch-hunt in its tracks.
Arthur Miller
One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
Robert A. Heinlein
I'd rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.
George Burns
These dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of the Winds; are indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than accidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are will made visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are clean, noiseless, starkly powerful. All the clatter and tumult of the early age of machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no coal grit, no dirt at all. The wheel pit into which one descends has an almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming turbines. These are altogether noble masses of machinery, huge black slumbering monsters, great sleeping tops that engineer irresistible forces in their sleep…. A man goes to and fro quietly in the long, clean hall of the dynamos. There is no clangor, no racket…. All these great things are as silent, as wonderfully made, as the heart in a living body, and stouter and stronger than that…. I fell into a daydream of the coming power of men, and how that power may be used by them.
H.G. Wells
Upon seeing the first great Niagara Falls power plant, which was created by Westinghouse and Tesla, among others.
With everyone talking about how they care so much about human life, I'd just like to see someone actually living one.
Jason Roth
On Triple Splitz-O Cups and Starving Children
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-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Statue Of Liberty
Inscription On The Statue Of Liberty
The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power. How naive the cliche that money is the root of evil!
Eric Hoffer
I think Ayn is right about a lot of things. Her respect for personal achievement, for one. Her opposition to the welfare state, or much of it, for another. But one mustn't say that. You have to throw welfare programs at people -- like throwing meat to a pack of wolves -- even if the programs don't accomplish their alleged purpose and even if they're morally wrong. Because otherwise they'll kill you. The masses. They hate intelligence. They're envious of ability. They resent wealth. You've got to throw them something so they'll let us live.
Bennett Cerf (owner, Random House Publishing, 1957)
My Years With Ayn Rand, by Nathaniel Branden
Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent.
Victor Davis Hanson
"The Global Throng" http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200502040750.asp
As individuals, we can certainly refuse to buy products from countries that engage in unsavory practices and encourage others to join our boycott. However, by making the boycott a national policy, we take away the personal freedom of our neighbors and impose our will on them. In other words, we try to change an oppressive regime abroad by becoming oppressors ourselves at home! The result: less freedom in the world, instead of more.
Mary Ruwart
When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.
Japanese Proverb
THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES
Anonymous
From a sign on an office cubicle
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
James Madison
Social Security was a great moral success of the 20th century...
President George W. Bush
Where carcasses are, eagles will gather, and where good laws are, much people flock thither.
Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac, 1734
The idea of an election is much more interesting to me than the election itself...The act of voting is in itself the defining moment.
Jeff Melvoin
An “anti-something” movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. Its passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program that they attack. People must fight for something that they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be.
Ludwig von Mises
The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
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